Among the Missing
by William Easley
Summary: Now seventeen, Dipper and Mabel drive up to Gravity Falls to begin their sixth summer among people and places they love. But what happens when they can't find-well, anything? Of course, they'll find Wendip, but what happened to everything else?
1. Chapter 1

_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you._

* * *

**Among the Missing**

**(June 2, 2017)**

* * *

**1: Destination Zero**

Though Mabel drove faster, Dipper and Wendy kept catching up to her and Grunkle Stan and passing them, only to be passed in turn.

For one thing, Stan wasn't the speedster his grandniece was, and during his stints at the wheel, he stayed behind but within sight of Dipper's new used car, and for another, about every two hours Stan and Mabel stopped to walk Tripper. So far he had no accidents in their car—well, now just Mabel's car, and Mabel didn't intend for him to start.

The four stopped once, in northern California for lunch, at a restaurant with outside tables where a leashed Tripper was welcome. They weren't rushed, and they got to the Oregon border in mid-afternoon.

Talking of prospective camping trips and places to explore in the coming summer, Dipper and Wendy had just passed through the medium-sized town of Bend, only a little more than an hour from the Falls. Soon they bypassed Morris and then were on the real home stretch. That was when Dipper's phone rang. He was at the wheel, though, and couldn't answer. "That's Grunkle Ford's ring tone," he said. "Can you get that? I forgot to power up my Bluetooth—"

"Got it," Wendy said, reaching across and fishing Dipper's cell phone out of his shirt pocket. "Hi, this is Mr. Dipper Pines's secretary, he's busy at the moment—Oh, hi, Dr. P. What's the matter? You sound—huh? Why? OK, sure, I'll tell him. Yes, in the rear, I understand—What? Well, last time they passed us, like five minutes ago, I saw that Mabel was driving, so I'd call Stan. Yeah, sure—but—well, OK."

"What's up?" Dipper asked.

"He wouldn't say," Wendy told him. "Something weird, I guess. Anyhow, he wants us not to go directly to the Falls, but to stop at his Institute. Man, it's just like us to be planning a great summer and have something come along and ruin it first thing. Gravity Falls's way of welcoming us back."

"If Ford's upset, it must be something paranormal," Dipper muttered. "I hope it's not too bad–"

"Watch the road, Dipper. We need to find a place to turn around."

"All right," Dipper said. "The intersection's only like twenty minutes from here, and it's not too far out of the way. Something really strange must be up. Unless—" he chuckled. "I think I know."

"What?" Wendy asked.

"Surprise graduation party!" Dipper said. "That's got to be it. You're in on it, aren't you?"

"No, man. Ford sounded pretty upset."

"Put your hand on my neck and tell me that," Dipper said in a teasing way.

Wendy cupped her warm palm against his neck. _Straight up, dude, I don't know anything about a party. And Ford sounded a little, um, anxious and scared. It's got me worried._

With that skin-to-skin contact, Dipper immediately knew that Wendy wasn't kidding. A pang of remorsesent a twinge through his heart.

—_Oh. I'm sorry, Wendy, I—oh, my gosh, what's happening, then? It must be something intense for Ford to warn us off. The werewolves? Think they've invaded the Valley? Or maybe—_

_Dude, pull over. There on the shoulder, before you get to the bridge. Come on, pull over and let me drive. Your heart rate's way up there. Seriously, I don't want you to smash up you new wheels 'cause you're anxious. Let me drive, OK?_

—_Yeah, OK._

Dipper pulled his Land Runner—he had not christened it, the way Mabel had immediately named their Carino Helen Wheels—off onto the broad shoulder. It looked like one of those spots where trout fishermen pulled off to climb down the bank to the stream, Graccius Fork as it was called—pronounced like "Gracious"—to stalk the elusive trout.

He parked, checked the rear-view to make sure nothing was coming up from behind, and climbed out as Wendy went around back. He got in on the passenger side, and she took the wheel. "Seatbelt, Dip."

He had already clicked the latch. "Got it. Go. Maybe I should call Ford."

"Yeah, I think maybe so." Wendy started the engine, checked for oncoming traffic, and they crossed the bridge. "Tell him we ought to be there in, like, a quarter hour." Not far north of the bridge she found a pull-off wide enough to let her safely reverse course.

As she started back southward, Dipper tried the call. Ford's phone went directly to voice mail. Trying not to sound flustered, Dipper said, "I think it's busy. I guess I can wait until we get there. I'll be glad to stretch my legs a little, anyhow."

* * *

At about the same moment, Stan's phone chimed. Grumbling a little, he reached into his jacket pocket, dragged it out, and answered: "Stanley Pines here. If you're trying to sell anything, forget it. Who's this?"

"Stanley, it's me!"

"Ford?" Stan asked. "How can it be? The real Ford would say—"

"It is I, Stanley!"

Stan snorted. "Yep, that's Mr. Stanford Grammar Pines, all right. Hi. You already get home? We're about fifteen minutes from—"

"No, listen," Stanford said. "I want you to turn around and go back to the fork. Take the Morris Road and come to the Institute for Anomalous Sciences. It's urgent. Park out back."

Stan blinked. "Huh? Listen, we're way past that already, Mabel's drivin', and her dog's getting' all excited 'cause he knows we're gettin' close to the Shack. Can't this wait?"

"What?" Mabel asked. "Can't what wait? A surprise welcome party? Ooh, no, wait, great idea! A surprise _graduation_ party! I always wanted a surprise party! I hope there's cake. Is there cake? What kind of icing? I like buttercream! Are my bffs gonna be there? Sure, they're gonna be there! Is there ice cream?"

"Sweetie, just a sec," Stan pleaded. Then he said into the phone, "OK, Sixer, I'll tell her and I guess we'll do it. But what in the hey is—"

"Do you have any money on you?" Stanford abruptly asked.

Stan blinked. "Don't tell me you've been kidnapped! I got walkin' around dough, but I ain't got enough on me for ransom—"

"Stanley! How much—wait, first have Mabel turn the car around."

"We're nearly at the entrance to the Valley," Stan said. "We'll wheel in there and turn around. Safer."

"Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked.

Stan said, "Just a second, Sweetie. Hey, at the turn-off to the Falls, do a uey and head back south, the way we just came."

Ford's insistent voice: "How much actual cash do you have, Stanley?"

Mabel, sounding really scared for some reason: "Grunkle Stan!"

Stan waved her off. "Can't take my wallet out right now and count, but I guess between a hundred-fifty and two hundred, but what in the heck—?"

"Grunkle Stan!" Mabel yelled. "Where's Gravity Falls?"

"Pumpkin, I'm talkin' to Ford—wait, what?" Stan blinked, not able to believe what he saw through the windshield.

The landscape was as familiar as the back of his hand. Almost everything looked just the same. They had just passed the home of the oddball retired Admiral who had a miniature military museum on his lawn. And he spotted the big boulder off to the left. The familiar tall firs lined the highway, interspersed with pines. In fact, only one thing had changed.

Stan saw, but could not believe, that no road turned off to the west. To his left in the breaks between tall pines, he could see only dark basaltic bluffs, their crests sprouting green pines. No overhanging cliffs, between them where the old trestle used to be, no metal sign saying WELCOME TO GRAVITY FALLS.

"Ford, what the heck is goin' on?" Stan asked. "Mabel, you didn't accidentally drive past—?"

Mabel said, "No! What did you say? Go_ back_?"

"Uh, yeah, Ford wants us to meet him at his school—"

Ford again: "Stanley, does Mabel have any cash?"

"Huh?"

"Ask her, Stanley!"

Stan relayed the question to Mabel.

"Cash? Oh, yeah," she said in a worried voice. She reached a straightaway, pulled off on the right shoulder, and wrenched Helen Wheels around so they were driving south, fish-tailing a little. "Graduation presents. About five hundred bucks, but that's—"

"She says five hundred," Stan told his brother.

"Good. I forgot to ask Mason, but when he and Wendy get here, I'll see what they have."

"Why do you got to have cash money, Sixer?" Stan bellowed.

"What? Oh. To pay the motel bill. Our credit cards aren't working. I'm even surprised that my computer phone is functional. Luckily, Fiddleford and Mayellen were out of the Valley when it happened. I got in touch with them—"

Stan all but bellowed, "When _what _happened?"

"I'll tell you," Ford said, "when you get here." A pause. "Stanley—don't be surprised at anything you see!"

* * *

"What the heck?" Dipper said as his car rattled over a rusty chain that had been unlocked from two iron pillars and left lying across the deteriorating asphalt driveway.

"Where are all the buildings?" Wendy asked.

"I—don't know!"

Stanford Pines had launched his Institute of Anomalous Studies on the site of an abandoned high-school building. And that was what they saw—no dorms, no other new buildings, just the derelict high school, a forlorn brick structure, obviously not in great shape, standing amid a forest of tall weeds and scraggly saplings. Wendy said, "He told me we should park behind."

Behind the school was a former loading area for the school cafeteria. Now it was hardly more than random pans of blacktop ground down into the earth, rank weeds colonizing every crack and crevice. Ford's Lincoln stood parked there, and Wendy pulled up beside it. As they were getting out of the car, he and Wendy heard another approaching, and in a moment the fluorescent green Carino, Helen Wheels, came into sight. Mabel didn't really park, just braked diagonally behind the Land Runner and shut off the engine.

Stan got out of the passenger side, and Tripper leaped out his door, too. Mabel stood beside the driver's side door, shaking a little. "Brobro, what the heck's going on?"

"Don't know," Dipper said. "Maybe Grunkle Ford can explain."

They had to wait for Tripper to water a couple of clumps of weeds, and then they went to the loading-dock door. It was unlocked. They stepped into the musty-smelling hallway.

"Wow," Dipper said, his voice echoing the way voices do in an empty building. "It sure looks different from the Institute!"

Wendy reflexively flipped the light switches, but nothing happened.

"No juice," Stan said. "It's OK, there's some light leakin' in from the glass doors."

Nothing was quite the same as Dipper remembered. But they found the main hall, went down it between ranks of rusting lockers, their doors hanging open, and down to the room that bore a flaking sign above the door: PR N IP L. Dipper remembered it as Room 101, really a suite of rooms: a reception area, a conference room, and Ford's office—he was President of the Institute.

The outer door was locked. A shadow loomed on the door's frosted-glass window, and Ford's voice boomed through it: "Who's there?"

"It is I," Stan said. "Still sounds wrong. Open up, Ford, it's me and the kids!"

They heard a key turn, and a haggard-looking Stanford Pines opened the door. "Thank God you're all right, at least. Something utterly incredible has happened. Or un-happened."

"What is it?" Dipper asked.

"Come into my–well, into the office, please." Ford had obviously pillaged a few abandoned rooms for furniture. Five rickety wooden chairs stood inside on a floor scattered with a fall of plaster and grit. Daylight struggled through the broken and bent slats of Venetian blinds on the front window. Standing in front of a decrepit old desk, Ford said, "Be seated please. I'll try to explain, and then I'll need to borrow some money—"

"I got a hundred or so," Wendy said.

"I have six hundred and twenty," Dipper volunteered.

"Well—I'll need about two hundred to secure the motel rooms. Dipper, your accounts are in Piedmont, so your bank cards should still be working. I—forgive me, I'm thoroughly shaken. Let me put this as simply as I can. Gravity Falls no longer exists."

"What?" Dipper asked.

Mabel started to shake. "We saw it was gone," she whispered.

"The Valley is not there," Ford said. "It's as if the alien craft never crashed, never blasted out the crater that over millions of years became the Valley. So—many things concerned with it have changed, too. My Institute, as you see, was never built. Fortunately, I never throw anything away, and I have the original keys, which still work—"

"Yeah, we're so lucky!" Stan growled. "Look Sixer, does this mean—no Mystery Shack? No Soos? Our houses are gone?"

"My family?" Wendy asked, her voice panicked. "Oh, my God, what's happened to Dad and the boys?"

"I—I'm not certain about anyone who lived there, or even what this event means," Stanford said. "But the cash you lend me will buy us at least a little time. We'll have to find out—and soon. I surmise that, being outside the boundary of the Valley at the moment when whatever did happen happened, we retain our memories of the reality we know. However, that may change! We must act fast, before the time comes when we're unable to recall that there ever was such a place as Gravity Falls!"


	2. Chapter 2

**Among the Missing**

**(June 2, 2017)**

* * *

**2: Castaways**

Dipper agreed to take some money to Lorena and Sheila, who would be in the coffee shop of the Common Inn motel outside of Morris. Wendy called shotgun, and they drove down. She kept punching numbers into her phone.

"What are you doing?" Dipper asked.

In a tight, worried tone, Wendy said, "Callin' everybody I know—my dad, my brothers, even my cousin Steve, Tambry, the Shack, Soos's cell, Melody's—no use." She put the phone on speaker mode.

Dipper heard part of the recorded message: "—sorry, but the number you have dialed is not in service. Please check—"

Wendy cut it off. "I gotta admit it, Dipper, I'm really scared."

"It's probably a time-change deal," Dipper told her. "Somehow we got switched to an alternate time-line, so reality shifted. We can probably get in touch with Blendin Blandin and ask him to fix it up."

"Wait, wait!" Wendy said. "Hello! Aunt Sallie! Thank God you—huh? Wendy. Wendy! Dan's daughter Wendy! What, no, don't hang—"

She turned her phone off. "Aunt Sallie says Dan doesn't have a daughter," she said bleakly.

"New timeline," Dipper said confidently. "In this one, you weren't born, probably because there was no Gravity Falls for you to be born in. Just wait. Blendin will sort it all out."

"How do we call that guy?"

Dipper shrank a little. "That's . . . a problem," he said.

They found the place and Dipper's great-aunts. Dipper gave them cash, and they arranged for two rooms for two nights—not bad, only $280—and then Lorena and Sheila asked if they could ride back with Dipper and Wendy.

"Sure," Dipper said. The ladies got into the back seat.

Wendy, her voice not steady, said, "You two don't seem too upset by all this."

Lorena said, "Dear, I've lived in Gravity Falls all my life. It takes a lot to upset me."

"More than this?" Dipper asked.

"I won't panic until Stanny does," Sheila said. "I'm sure this seems worse than it actually is."

When they got back to the old high school, another car—Fiddleford's rugged extended-cab pick-up—was also there. They went in, and Wendy said, "Hey, they got the lights on!"

Following the sound of voices, they found the rest of the group in the school library. Mabel and Mayellen McGucket sat at a dilapidated library table—Tripper was napping at Mabel's feet. Ford hugged Lorena, Sheila kissed Stan, and Dipper asked, "Where are we?"

"Fiddleford brought a friend," Ford explained. "He and Mayellen were passing a small carnival, and he spotted someone he knew from long ago, stopped, and the man volunteered to come with him. They've been re-wiring the junction box—the power wasn't really off, just disconnected—and we've decided that the library is the safe room, since it has no windows to show light and attract attention."

Fiddleford came in with a skinny guy in jeans and a red tee-shirt, bald, with head tattoos. Dipper heard him say, "—should never have invented that danged memory gun. Nothin' but trouble—oh, hey, ladies, Wendy, Dipper."

"I'm a lady, too!" Wendy said with a flash of humor.

"Sorry. Hey, look who Mayellen and I found. This here's my old friend—"

"Toot-toot McBumbersnazzle," the bald man said. "Or I thought I was until this gentleman stopped where we were working and called me—called me—"

"Ivan," Fiddleford said helpfully. "Ivan Wexler, if I rememberfy right. Might not, my brain got plumb scramblifried by that memory gun. Which you done forgot about, but that ain't no matter."

"Ivan," the man said in his deep, British-accented voice. "Ivan. It sounds . . . vaguely familiar. But I'm a banjo minstrel with the carnival. I don't remember anything about, um, well, much of anything, really. Except I think I was a gearshift lever at one point."

Dipper gave Wendy a sidelong glance. They'd really hit Blind Ivan hard with the memory eraser. Maybe too hard.

"Think," Fiddleford urged. "Do you remember a spot name of Gravity Falls?"

Ivan shook his head. "No," he said slowly. "I can't say that I do."

"What's Ford doing?" Dipper asked.

Over at the librarian's desk, Ford had set up a laptop computer and a few instruments. Sheila, who had a degree in physics, was assisting him. Dipper and Wendy murmured their farewells to Ivan and went over. "What's up, Dr. P?" Wendy asked. "Have you found a way out of all this mess?"

"Hello, Wendy, Dipper. Thank you for rescuing Sheila and Lorena. No, but we're making progress."

"What are you doing?" Dipper asked.

"Testing hypotheses," Ford said. "I'm sorry to say that my initial one does not check out at all."

"What was that?" Dipper asked.

"That something went awry far in the past to prevent the alien ship from crashing. But that doesn't appear to be the case. My instruments indicate that we are still in our original time-line. No deviations at all. And yet the Valley is not there—"

"And I was never born," Wendy said. "At least, according to my Aunt Sallie."

"What?" Ford asked.

Wendy told him the story—trying to reach Soos and all the others, getting the "no such number" robo-response, and finally calling her aunt, who had no memory of her ever being born.

"Very strange," Ford murmured. "I have discovered another bizarre phenomenon. The high school here has no internet connectivity, of course, but I have designed a device that I think may well be worth patenting and marketing. It's this—as you see, no larger than a computer-phone—and yet it can reach a relay satellite and provide us with a signal that my computer can connect with—"

"It's a wi-fi hotspot," Dipper pointed out.

Ford murmured the words. "Yes, that might be a good name for it! But I'd suggest wi-free hotspot. You see, it doesn't depend upon wires—"

"Dude," Wendy said gently, "they already exist."

"They do?" Ford asked. He shrugged. "Oh, well. That's the curse of missing thirty years of technological development. Wireless Internet, bots, somebody ruined the whole _Star Wars _saga—there's so much to catch up on that I fear I'm still behind the curve. Anyway, I can connect a browser to the internet. But watch."

He rattled the keys of the laptop, and the Goggle Roam app fired up. "This is my normal home page," Ford said.

It was a black page with only a red A on it. "The Agency?" Dipper asked.

"Yes, and my passwords still work. However—"

He got a search engine up and said, "Let's look up a news service. Name one, Dipper."

"Umm, Fixed News," Dipper said.

Ford made a face. "A little right-wing for my tastes, but—" he keyed in a search and got a result, which he clicked on. "Now watch. This is the strangest phenomenon."

The Fixed News logo—a slyly winking eye, white on a blue background, with the big red FIXED beneath—came up, and then—

"—gonna give you up, never gonna let—" the computer sang.

Ford X'ed out of the site. "That is more than enough of that! Every site I try to access starts playing that inane song!"

"Yeah," Wendy agreed. "It's as bad as "Straight Blanchin'."

"What?" Ford asked. "'Blanching?' That's not even a word!"

"I know, right?" Wendy said.

"It is, though," Dipper said. "Blanch means to put vegetables in boiling water, then plunge them into ice water. It also can be used to mean that someone turns pale from fear or—"

"Makes no sense in context, dude," Wendy said.

"Don't argue with Wendy," Ford said testily.

"Yes, sir," Dipper murmured, blanching.

Fiddleford came over. "Ya know," he said, "I remember how Ivan come to disremember things. I reckon he might could recover with some coachifyin'. But I don't know if that would be a good thing. When he was a young'un, pore ole Ivan was never happy, but he enjoys a-plunkin' that banjo of his'n."

"Ivan? Oh, the carny," Ford said. "Yes, I remember meeting him when he was only a teen. Well, let's worry about that later. Right now, I'm at an impasse. This is not an altered time-line or anything that time-travel can rectify, as far as I can tell. However, I may be wrong, and we must pursue that possibility to be absolutely sure. Where's Mabel? Mabel! Could you come here, please?"

"What, Grunkle Ford?" she asked, coming over, Tripper prancing beside her. "Have you found a way to fix it? 'Cause the phone's telling me there's no such numbers as Teek's cell or house phone, and I know that's wrong."

"You said something about getting in touch with your time-traveling friend?" Ford asked.

"Oh, yeah, Blendin," Mabel said. "We just have to send him a message. He owes me a do-over."

"How do we send him a message?" Dipper asked his sister.

"Duh! Take out an ad in the paper," Mabel said.

Wendy said, "Mabes, wouldn't we have to take out an ad in the far-future paper or some deal?"

"Nope," Mabel said smugly. "The TPAES has a whole crew that does nothing but look through old newspapers for ads with a keyword in them. That's how their squad members communicate if they get stuck in the past and need rescuing."

"How . . . do you know this?" Dipper asked her.

Mabel gave him a smug, superior glance. "Easy. That time when we were in the year twenty sneventy twelve, I took a pamphlet from the TPAES recruiting booth. _So You Want to Be a TPAES Recruit._"

"And you never told me?" Dipper asked.

"Well, _you_ never told _me _about kissing Eloise!" Mabel said.

"Wait, what!" Wendy said.

"She kissed _me!"_ Dipper said. "And besides, how did you even know?"

"'Cause you talk in your sleep!" Mabel said.

"I do not! Anyway, we sleep in separate rooms!"

"Yeah, but I got my voice recorder, smart guy! And you never think to look under your bed!" Mabel glanced at Wendy. "If your mental telepathy ever breaks down, just listen to what he says when he's sleeping."

"What did he say?" Wendy asked.

"This isn't fair!" Dipper said.

"Relax, Bro," Mabel told him. "He said, 'Don't kiss me, Eloise, I'm in love with a wonderful girl.'"

"Aw, that's sweet," Wendy said.

"I think I've been Rick-rolled," Dipper groaned.

Ford said, "Interesting though this discussion might someday become, the salient point is that I believe we should attempt to get in touch with your time-traveling friend. Is there a particular newspaper—?"

"_The National Expirer_," Mabel said. "That's always monitored. The pamphlet says."

Since the Internet wouldn't work for them, it was a long-distance call, but they made contact, and Mabel dictated the ad and paid for it with Dipper's debit card.

It read,

* * *

TEEPEE AYE EE ESS! Blendin, Lolph's Gam-Gam needs you! Find her after June 2 at Glam 618 Gfkfkv Vfz Kgkvzq Hnmtgz Sjzier! 13 25 19 20 5 18 25 20 23 9 14 19

* * *

"I'm not sure about this," Dipper said as Mabel hung up.

"Aw, they're nuts about solving codes in the TPAES," Mabel said. "Thanks for helping with the vinegar cipher, Brobro."

"It's Vigenère," Dipper said. "And you're not supposed to send the key in the same message—"

"Dude," Wendy said. "It's cool, man. What kind of random geeks would notice that and solve the cypher?"

"The ones who read the _Expirer_," Dipper muttered.

"Well, let us hope that your message brings results," Ford told Mabel. "I don't believe there's anything else we can do tonight. We'd best get to the motel and try to get some sleep. Fiddleford, will you and Mayellen and your guest go with us?"

"Naw," Fiddleford said. "I reckon we oughta camp out here. Somebody oughta stay in our temporary headquarters. It won't be too bad. I got some sleepin' bags in the truck, an' me and Mayellen have roughed it a time or two. Ivan, do you—"

"Toot-toot," said Blind Ivan.

"Uh, right, Toot-toot, you want us to take you back to the carnival?"

"I suppose," the musician said. "We'll be in Haywell County until Monday, anyway, if you should need me."

"Come on, Mayellen," Fiddleford said.

"She's welcome to come with us," Ford told him.

Fiddleford looked at his old friend. "Thanks for the kind thought, Ford. But I once lost Mayellen for thirty-odd years. I ain't lettin' her outa my sight agin, so long as things are so gummified up like they are."

As they drove back to the motel, following Ford and Lorena in Ford's Lincoln, Wendy suddenly said, "Dipper—can we sleep in the same bed tonight?"

"I'd like that," Dipper told her. "And at this point, I don't think anybody would mind."

"It's just that I'm scared," she admitted.

"So am I," Dipper told her. "So am I."


	3. Chapter 3

**Among the Missing **

**(Evening, June 2, 2017)**

* * *

**3: Observer Effect**

The motel rooms were medium-sized, better than the Rusty Roof down in Piedmont. Each one had two queen-sized beds, a table, a fridge and microwave, a flat-screen TV, a generous closet, and a serviceable bathroom. The motel offered free wi-fi, a complimentary breakfast, no room service, but a couple of nearby restaurants delivered, if you wanted pizza, sandwiches, or fried chicken.

The older Pines Twins and their wives shared one room; Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy took the other, and they smuggled Tripper in. The motel did not expressly forbid pets, but neither did it expressly permit them, so Mabel acted on her usual assumption that it's always better to ask forgiveness later than permission before. Taking his paw in her hand, she explained to Tripper very seriously that he would have to be quiet, no barking, not even if someone came to the door, and if someone did come, he was to squirm under the bed and hide. "Can you do that?" she asked. "Show me!"

Tripper went belly-flat and sort of swam on the carpet, squirming beneath the bed. "Good boy!" Mabel said. "You can come out now."

He did, on the far side, decorated with three small gray dust bunnies. "We'll tell Housekeeping to clean under the beds tomorrow morning," Mabel said. "So—this is my bed. Wendy, are you gonna, uh, share with, uh, me—"

"Gonna bunk in with Dipper tonight," Wendy said. "No fooling around, but with my family missing and all—I just need the contact."

"Gotcha," Mabel said. "I won't tell."

"I'm going next door to talk to Stan and Ford," Dipper said. "Want to come?"

"I think we girls will stay here," Wendy said.

Mabel nodded. "Yeah, Dip and Grunkle Ford are gonna be all like, 'Sciencey timey-wimey dimension theories,' and Grunkle Stan's gonna be all 'Talk English, for cryin' out loud!' Hey, Dipper, when you come back, bring us some dinner, OK?"

"What do you want?" he asked.

Mabel looked at Wendy, who just shrugged. So she told her brother, "Anything. Burgers, pizza. Oh, get Tripper just a plain hamburger."

Tripper yipped softly and discreetly.

"Not too well-done, he says," Mabel added. "No fries."

"Dude, did he actually ask for it not to be well-done?" Wendy said.

"Yep," Mabel said confidently. "He likes 'em rare."

"I'll see what I can do," Dipper promised.

Just across the street from the Common Inn was the Friendly Table, a small restaurant that seemed like a family place. Dipper, Stanley, and Ford walked over and went in, a waiter showed them to a booth, but Ford pointed instead to another in the very back corner, which seemed fine by the waiter. When they were seated, Ford asked him, "Pardon me, but could the three of us just start with coffee, and then place a take-out order as we get ready to leave?"

"Sure," the young guy said. "What'll it be?"

"Decaf," Dipper said, knowing that he'd have a hard time sleeping anyway. "Cream, please."

"The same for me," Stanford said.

"Heck with that. High-test for me," Stanley told the waiter.

"Sir?"

"Caffeinated, full-strength. Black's fine. Oh, two sugars."

"Grunkle Ford, any ideas?" Dipper asked when the waiter had gone. Stanford had chosen a booth with no occupied tables near, and the place was not yet crowded.

"I'm currently at a stand," Ford admitted.

"This ain't a stand, it's a sit-down restaurant," Stanley told him. "A stand is—oh, wait, I get it. You're flummoxed."

"More or less," Stanford said. "I've eliminated some possibilities." He held up a hand and ticked off points on his six fingers: "This is not an alternate universe. It is our normal universe. It is not a pocket dimension. It is not an alternate time-line. It is not merely an optical illusion. It is not a mass hallucination. It may be—though I cannot understand how—that our memories of there ever having been a Gravity Falls are false ones, implanted somehow."

"No," Dipper said. "Too much happened there. If there's never been a Gravity Falls—I'd never have met Wendy. Or the two of you."

Stanley agreed: "Sixer, if you hadn't had Dan Corduroy build your house, I would never have turned it into the Mystery Shack."

"And I would not have built the Portal, been lost among the infinite dimensions for thirty years, and been rescued by you." Fore laughed without any sign of humor. "In fact, nothing much would have happened to either of us, because there would be no such being as Bill Cipher."

"Bill," Dipper said. "Um, I could try to get in touch with that little part of him inside me."

"I hesitate to ask that before understanding more about our dilemma," Stanford said.

"Which so far you don't understand one single thing about," Stanley pointed out.

Their coffees came. They sipped their coffees. They stared down into their cups.

"Wait until you return to the motel to try, anyway," Stanford told Dipper. "I'll come in and observe."

"Thanks," Dipper said.

They sipped their coffees. They stared down into their cups.

Stanford tried to put up a brave front: "Anyway, tomorrow Fiddleford and I will see what we can do with the equipment he and I have on hand. He's amazingly adept at modifications and innovations. Perhaps there's some angle that I'm not thinking of, some avenue we can explore. And Mabel's message to—Mr. Bland? I forget the name."

"Blendin Blandin," Dipper said. "He's from the far future. He works for Time Baby."

"Him," Ford said, rolling his eyes. "I dread to think of the state of the universe n twelve million years, when Time Baby becomes a Time Teenager! No offense, Dipper."

"That's OK," Dipper said. "I guess I was a pain in the ass sometimes back when I was thirteen, fourteen."

A grinning Stanley said, "Ain't you gonna apologize for using that word in front of your grunkles? No, don't. I like it. Shows you're getting to be a real man. Dipper, uh, look, I know I've treated you rough now and then. But I want you to know, I always respected your brains and I always um—this is not bad, um, coffee. Um, loved you."

Dipper couldn't help smiling broadly. "Thanks, Grunkle Stan. I love you guys, too."

Ford adjusted his spectacles. "My word. Normally I eschew displays of emotion—they do tend to cloud one's scientific judgment—but please allow me say I echo Stanley's thoughts."

"Yeah," Stan said dryly. "Mr. Warmth, that's my brother. Now I understand what makes Lorena love you."

They sipped their coffee. They stared down into their cups. And eventually they placed a big order, sandwiches and burgers, left a good tip, and carried the bagged food back across the street to the motel, not really any closer to an answer, but a tiny bit closer, perhaps, to each other.

* * *

Tripper's behavior was—not troubling, exactly, but somehow unusual. Oh, granted, he was a genius as a dog, probably in the doggy-Einstein range, and he understood about four thousand English words and could even create messages by arranging wooden letter blocks, though he could not spell worth a darn. But somehow—

The dog seemed to be on the trail of something none of the others could see.

The teens had tried the TV. No Gravity Falls station, no terrible Friday-night old movies. In fact, no stations whatever. A call to the desk brought them the word that the cable and wi-fi system was down, unknown causes, and they hoped to have it back up by tomorrow morning.

So they all three sat on one bed and talked.

And meanwhile, Tripper paced around the room and kept stopping and tilting his head inquisitively and looking at something that none of them could see. Dipper noticed it first. "What's Tripper staring at?" he asked in almost a whisper.

Dipper and Wendy sat shoulder to shoulder at the head of the bed. Mabel sat toward the foot, her back to the room. She turned around, frowning. "I've noticed him doing that before, Dip. I think sometimes Tripper can see things that we can't."

Tripper paid them no attention. He sat near the wall of the motel room, the one that it shared with the next unit. He was looking up, as if spotting something on the wall about six or eight feet tall. His triangular ears were perked, and his muzzle swiveled left to right as he followed something like an invisible, inaudible table-tennis game, back and forth. At one point, he backed sharply away for a few steps, then circled, sat with his back toward the wall, and swiveled his head as if he were watching an invisible something glide across the room. Then he followed it step by step to the opposite wall and stopped, shook himself, and glanced up at the kids as if to say, "Well, what do you think of that?"

"Ghost?" Mabel asked.

"I don't think so," Dipper said. "The anomaly detector gives a clean reading."

"The more this kind of weird junk goes on, the less I like it," Wendy said.

Someone tapped at the door, startling them all. Tripper vanished under Mabel's bed like a magic trick.

Dipper went to the door and looked through the peephole. "Grunkle Ford," he said, unchaining and unlocking the door.

Stanford asked, "Have you all finished eating?"

"Yes, we're through," Dipper said.

"The burgers were too well-done," Mabel said helpfully. "Except Tripper's. He thought his was great. What's up?"

"First, have you heard from the time-traveling gentleman?" Ford asked.

"Blendin? No." Mabel shook her head. "I think it's set up so the visit doesn't come the same date that you send it, though. It violates causality, and that makes Time Baby have a tantrum."

Ford nodded. "Well, we'll wait until tomorrow for that. Right now, I thought perhaps Mason could enter the Mindscape. It would be best if you two ladies went next door. Any distraction could disrupt his efforts."

Wendy hesitated. "Is this gonna be dangerous? Straight up, Dr. P."

"It—shouldn't be," Stanford said. "However, under current conditions—well, I'm not sure what, if anything, we can even accomplish—"

"But we should try," Dipper said.

"I'll stand watch," Ford assured them. "At the least sign of discomfort or trouble, I'll bring Mason out of the trance."

Wendy kissed Dipper, Mabel gave him a thumbs-up, they checked to make sure the coast was clear, and then they and the contraband Tripper went next door.

Ford pulled up a chair. "You know the technique now, probably better than I ever did," he said. "If you can make contact with Cipher, just ask him—what is going on?"

"I'll try," Dipper said. He lay back on the bed, Ford turned off the overhead light and turned on a lamp that gave soft, muted illumination, and sat in the chair beside the bed. "Any time you're ready."

Dipper began to pace his breathing and began the relaxation techniques.

* * *

Something, someone, was observing all this. What or who—well, that's another matter altogether and, in a word, problematic. It was, technically, one mind, yet as it often did for convenience sake, it had fragmented into separate facets of consciousness. It did not speak, listen, or reply, and yet it communicated with itself. One might say it thought; and that each sub-unit of itself was like a single neuron in a human brain, seemingly separate, and yet part of a whole, connected to every one of its fellows. Or something.

_The small unit of Type 5-c life has some awareness of ME._

_It sees ME, yes. It senses ME. It has photon receptors and chemical receptors and its sensitivity to vibrations in the atmospheric medium is extraordinarily high, much more acute than any of the Type 7-k/l forms. It is aware of ME._

_That is not possible._

_Yet it happens, and therefore it is possible._

_MY occlusion of all senses of lesser organisms has always been complete. Nothing has been able to penetrate the veil of perception and encounter ME._

_Perhaps ending the existence of the small life form would be best._

_That would prevent it from arousing the suspicions of the dominant Type 7-k/l life forms, true._

_Yet MY principle has always been not to end the existence of sentient forms unless one should directly threaten MY existence._

_That is impossible._

_Nothing from this insignificant world could possibly be a threat to ME._

_That much is true._

_Yes._

_Yes._

_Is the form 5-c sentient, though?_

_More than usual. In a different way, approximating the sentience level of the Type 7s. Not the same quality of thought, yet comparable._

_MY decision is not to terminate its existence. What else?_

_What is the horizontal Type 7-k attempting?_

_These forms must cyclically enter a temporary dormant state. They call it "sleep."_

_This is more than that, however. It is not sleep, yet like sleep._

_Let ME watch._

_Yes._

_Yes._

The intelligence—well, the alien—the being—English has no words really to identify and describe the hive-minded observer, but anyway, the facets and fragments carried on a complex and no doubt contentious discussion with themselves, which is to say with itself. It was a bit like you feel when you're hungry and you don't know what you want, and some part of your mind says, "Hey, a burger," and another one says, "Yuck! No. Tacos!" and a third one whines, "Mexican again? I want sushi." Yeah, you've been there.

Or you sometimes hear people say, "I don't know. I'm of two minds about that."

Yeah, kind of like that.

But multiplied.

And the other interesting part was that while Ford watched Dipper put himself into a lucid trance state, the Observer in turn watched both of them, but at the same time and in the exact same room, except it wasn't, really, the Observer also watched and eavesdropped on Stanley, Mabel, Sheila, and Lorena worry and talk about the change in conditions that the Observer had imposed. The other person, Wendy—the Observer puzzled over her. She was perhaps a whole new variant of Type 7-l. Something about her obscurely resonated with the Observer.

This is hard to put into words.

Try this: There is a famous war novel, originally in German, about soldiers in the First World War. They happen to be young German soldiers, but they could be French or British or American. It wouldn't matter.

Here is the thing: In one scene, set during a summer in between battles, a young soldier, far from home, lonely, badly fed, frightened, grieving the gruesome deaths of some of his friends, lies stretched on his belly in the grass some hundreds of meters behind the trenches.

He watches a beetle slowly and methodically climb a long stalk of grass. The soldier thinks, _I could kill this insect. I have that power. I can kill it or let it live. I feel nothing toward it. I am indifferent to its fate._

Yet he takes no action. Somehow, in a way he cannot explain, he feels a sudden, strong bond to the beetle. They are both living things. And as he is to the beetle, Something greater than the soldier is to him. Something absolutely indifferent to him may arbitrarily kill him or let him live. He feels a kinship.

And the Observer, studying Wendy the way the fictional soldier studied a lowly beetle—and seeing her in much the same way—suddenly, uneasily, felt a kinship with these puny short-lived beings.

And wondered about them and about itself.


	4. Chapter 4

**Among the Missing **

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**4: Timey-Wimey Stuff**

If he had not shared a bed with Wendy that night, Dipper wouldn't have slept at all on Friday. His and Stanford's attempt to communicate with Bill in the Mindscape completely failed. That had happened before, and in itself, it wasn't so surprising.

Proximity to the Bill effigy always helped, Dipper believed. That made no logical sense, Stanford thought—the Mindscape, the realm of dreams, was everywhere, after all. However, for Dipper somehow it was much easier to summon up Bill's projection of himself when he was near the stone statue, the last remnant of Cipher's physical form left over from Weirdmageddon.

The few molecules of Bill that were lodged somewhere in Dipper's heart didn't really count—Bill had painfully reconstituted them after his fall, furtively snatching stray atoms of gold and somehow transporting them and then transmuting them into a kind of form in the Mindscape. They were replacement parts, not original equipment.

Anyway, contacting Bill when Dipper entered the Mindscape in Piedmont rarely worked. It was different in the area close to the stone effigy. Even here in Oregon, only a few miles from the Valley—or where the Valley was supposed to be—calling him into a dream should have been possible, but nothing happened. The Mindscape itself, usually a monotone version of his surroundings, had been strangely bleak, not a finished painting but merely a very rough pencil sketch of the Shack and its surroundings. Dipper and Ford gave up on the attempt around ten in the evening.

He, Wendy, and Mabel had gone to bed not long after that. Dipper felt on edge and wakeful, but, snuggled close to Wendy, he did fall asleep and as far as he recalled, did not dream.

He woke up at six with his arms around her. She lay mostly on her stomach, but turned slightly toward him, her breath warm on his cheek. He felt his bare arm touching hers and thought, _-Are you awake?_

She wasn't. He caught part of her dream: Wendy, evidently competing in lumberjack games, doggedly climbing a tree, with some opponents nearby in other trees. They were climbing hard and closing in on their goals, but Wendy's tree was growing impossibly fast as she climbed it, making the finish line recede maddeningly as she strove to reach it.

He felt her frustration, and then, dimly, the thought, _Mm, Dipper? Why're you here—oh. I was dreaming, wasn't I?_

—_Didn't mean to wake you up. Yeah, you were dreaming. Sort of a nightmare._

_Nah, just a frustration dream. Nightmares always feature me made out of cloth and hangin' on a wall. Time is it?_

—_Uh six-three. About the time I wake up for school. Used to wake up for school._

_I know, right? After I graduated, it was really hard adjusting. For about a week! Then you showed up, and it was all right again._

Tripper stood on his hind legs, bracing his front paws on her edge of the bed, and Wendy turned onto her back and reached to pet him. "Need to go out, boy?"

He tapped her hand with a paw. Once. That meant "yes."

Dipper got out of bed. "I'll take him. We can go out back—there's some trees there, and this early, nobody will see him."

"Let me drag on some clothes and I'll come and stand lookout for you."

They went out into a cool, misty morning. No one was stirring, so they quickly led Tripper to the tree line. He seemed uncomfortable for some reason. He sniffed his way over to a row of tightly-packed trees, cast back and forth along them, and finally seemed to resign himself, and saluted one of the trunks with a hind leg. And then with a strangely apologetic glance at Dipper, he pooped.

"Rats," Dipper said. "I should've brought a baggie. I just didn't think—"

"Should be OK back in here, Dip," Wendy said. "I don't think this is exactly a public area."

"Guess not."

Wendy said, "Wonder why he was so picky at first?"

"Yeah, he acted strange," Dipper agreed. "Hesitant, like he was in the house and knew he wasn't supposed to go there. What are you looking at?"

"These trees," Wendy said, her head tilted far back.

"What about them?"

"What kind are they?"

"Huh?" Wendy was the forestry expert. She planned to major in forest ecology in college, and like the old, old song about Davy Crockett, she'd been raised in the woods and knew every tree—at least by species. Even the very rare Woodpecker Trap tree. He took a close look at the trees, and at first didn't see anything wrong. And then he did.

Smooth trunks—very smooth—a deep tan in color, rose up to conical crowns of dark-green needles. They were pines, probably.

But—pines with bark smoother than that of birches?

"I've never seen this kind of tree before," Wendy said. "I'm not even sure these are trees! They're more like—I dunno—sculptures of trees. All the crowns are perfect cones, see? And they all start at the same height from the ground. That's not natural."

She reached out to stroke the bark. "Feels like wood, but, you know, more furniture than tree trunk. Dr. P. needs to look at these."

"Come on."

They put Tripper back in the unit with Mabel, who was still asleep, and tapped on the door of the other room. Ford, already dressed in slacks and shirt, opened it and stepped out. "Good morning," he said. "I thought we'd take advantage of the motel's free breakfast and then—what's the matter?"

"Dr. Pines," Wendy said, "I want you to come with us over there at the far side of the parking lot. See the trees there?"

"Yes, of course," he said, adjusting his spectacles.

"They're wrong," Wendy told him. "You can see up close. I mean, from here it's not obvious, but from their size they should be, oh, young Ponderosas, and they aren't. See, they're like, generic. Come on, we'll show you."

The three of them walked across the lot, through some low ground-cover plants obviously put there by the motel, and then—

"Whoa," Wendy said, stopping. "This isn't right. Dipper—they changed!"

"Yeah, I see they have," Dipper said.

The trees still looked superficially the same as they had—but now their trunks weren't smooth, but clad in bark with zig-zag scales, like close-fitting jigsaw pieces, and thirty feet overhead, the needles no longer were neat cones, but grew in only roughly conical shape. Wendy bent down and picked up a fallen twig with brown needles clinging to it. "Ponderosa—now they are," she said. "See, needles growing in clumps of three? And now there's pine cones up there. There weren't before!"

"She's right, Grunkle Ford," Dipper said. "Just a minute ago, these were like, you know, artificial trees, like fake ones made for a stage set or something. Now they're real."

"Look real," Wendy said.

"Are you certain of your observations?" Ford asked. "You weren't just on edge, or sleepy?"

"Wendy's an expert," Dipper said firmly. "She couldn't be fooled. And we weren't particularly sleepy—this is about the time we'd normally get up and go for a run—and I saw the same thing she did. If you just looked casually, the trees seemed OK. But up close, when you paid attention, they were obvious fakes."

"I don't know what to make of that," Ford said. He took the twig from Wendy. "Too bad the school didn't leave behind some microscopes. However, Fiddleford and I will do what we can with this."

Breakfast wasn't great—cold cereals and pastries, mostly, though the dining room provided a short hot-food buffet table where you could get scrambled eggs, bacon, and oatmeal. Dipper settled for that, but it was tasteless and the consistency was about that of library paste. Mabel smuggled some scrambled eggs out for Tripper, who ate them with not much sign of enjoyment, unusual because normally he went into ecstasies when Mabel snuck him some people food.

To avoid attracting attention, Ford, Stan, Lorena, and Sheila drove over to the old school first in Ford's car. Then, following Ford's instructions, half an hour later, Dipper drove his car over with Wendy beside him and Mabel and Tripper in the back seat. One of them was complaining. One guess who it was.

"What if something urgent comes up?" Mabel asked. "What if Teek calls and I got to go rescue him? Why can't I drive Helen Wheels over?"

"Because we don't want to park a whole lot of cars behind the school," Dipper said. "Somebody might notice and come and check us out. Sis, I promise that if Teek calls and you have to ride to the rescue, you can take my car."

"It doesn't even have a name," Mabel said. "How can I trust it?"

"It's the Licorice Whip," Dipper said.

"Huh."

"You just come up with that, man?" Wendy asked.

"Just this second."

"Licorice Whip. 'Cause it's black and shiny and fast," Mabel said. "That'll do!"

Dipper took one hand off the steering wheel to grasp Wendy's wrist. _–One favor, Magic Girl. Never, ever call the car "Licorice Whip" when you're talking to me._

_Got it, Big Dipper. _She sent him a mental image of her zipping her lip and flipping away the key, making him smile.

Because of the tree incident, Dipper watched everything as he drove—watched it, as Soos would have said, like a HAWK, dude! Everything looked normal, though. A typical sleepy early-Saturday morning in Oregon. Normal traffic, cars and trucks and once in a while a big lumber hauler. He purposely allowed a Toyota Camry to pass him as he approached the old school. When it was out of sight, he made the turn in, drove to the back, and parked the car next to Ford's Lincoln and Fiddleford's truck.

They found the others in the school library. Ford was saying, "We may somehow have been transported to a construct. That is, this whole area may be a replica of the area around Gravity Falls. It's possible that if we tried to drive to Portland, we might gradually see that the roads are different and might find we're somewhere in Washington State, or Canada, instead."

"Nah," Stan said. "Me and Mabel drove here. We didn't take any detours to La-La Land or wherever. And I've drove past that motel, musta been a hundred times. Even ate in the Friendly Restaurant a time or two. I'd know if it was phony."

"Yeah," Mabel chimed in. "And how could we not have noticed if we were way off track?"

"Midazolam," Ford replied.

"Say what, Sixer?"

Lorena explained: "Midazolam. It's a drug used in surgery. It's a kind of sedative, but it doesn't make you unconscious. If you've had a colonoscopy, they may have used it."

"This is getting' weird," Stan said. "You don't mean we somehow drove up our own a—uh, colons, do ya?"

"That would be an extraordinary feat," Ford said. "No. But an effect of midazolam is to create short-term amnesia. Though you may be awake enough to carry on meaningful conversations and perhaps even operate a vehicle, when the effect of the sedation wears off, you'll have no memory of the event."

"I had a night or two like that in high school," Stan said. "But I didn't take nothing out of a bottle. Not a medicine bottle, anyways. But wouldn't we have to have had a shot or an IV or something? I got no sore places. Anybody else?"

Nobody did. Dipper said, "Grunkle Ford, how did you and Sheila and Lorena find out about all of this?"

"Well, we arrived in Portland around eleven in the morning," he said. "I'd left my car there, we reclaimed it, and we took our time driving back, knowing that you, Stan, Wendy, and Mabel wouldn't be able to drive up before about six in the afternoon. We stopped in the Dalles for lunch, the ladies did a little shopping, and then we continued to Gravity Falls. We arrived in the county—what, dear, around four p.m.?"

"A little before," Lorena said. "About three forty-five. And we turned south and drove to where the Valley should have been—and it wasn't there."

"We know the feeling," Mabel said. "Then we came along like an hour and a half after that, and same thing—woops! There's my phone." She pulled her chiming cell phone out. "It's Blendin! We're at the old school, Blendin! It's off highway—what? Wait a minute, let me put you on speaker. There. Say that again."

A high-pitched stammer came from the speakers: "I s-said you, you aren't anywhere near Gravity Falls," it said. "Right now I'm s-standing right-right out-outside the Mystery Shack. I just spoke to Soos. He's alarmed be-because you aren't here."

"But the Valley's not there any longer!" Dipper said. "Wait, can't you somehow lock onto our position?"

"I-I should be able to, but-but some-something's jamming my readouts. They're strange. If I believed them, you'd be a mi-mile up in the air."

"No, we're at the high school," Mabel said. "The old one that's not used any more. It's right on the ground."

"I'm sorry, but-but you don't have a time-problem," Blendin said. "That's all I can tell you—hello? Are you there?"

"We're here!" Mabel said.

"Mabel? Ma-Mabel? I think we've lost con—"

Blendin's voice broke off in the middle of the word.

"Rats!" Mabel said. "I'll re-dial him."

She tried. Nothing happened. Not a thing.

"I got bars," she said, looking at the phone. "Wait, let me try something." She punched in another number.

Nothing happened again.

"Dip, you got your phone?"

"Right here," he said, taking it out.

"It should be ringing. I just called you. Try calling me."

Dipper punched her speed-dial number. He got nothing, no dial tone, no ring tone, and her phone did not chime. He said, "I think our phones have just stopped working."

"I'm liking this less and less," Wendy said. "And dudes, that's saying something—'cause I started out _hating _it!"


	5. Chapter 5

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**5: Hearts Can Break in Two**

In the vast and cool silence of its existence, the Observer conferred with the components of itself.

_These beings must be the source of all the technology I have observed. MY understanding expands. Now I perceive that something about their biology deprives them of shared mind. It must be the gender separation—two units required to produce new units. I have seen this before, but always in lesser species. Unlike MY species, the humans are not of one mind. To compensate, they have created these devices to communicate._

_The program detected that. When the Wendy unit attempted a call, it intercepted and used the unit's memory of its—genetic associate? What is the word? Its aunt to cut her inquiry short._

_But the Mabel unit . . . placed . . . a . . . call successfully. Why did the program fail?_

_The Mabel unit is . . . a . . . being? Of a certain chaotic nature in thought patterns. Anyway, the device only briefly connected. And whoever she . . . the word is called . . . whoever she called cannot locate or respond further to her._

_It was only by chance that the telephone device managed a connection. Still, the program should have alerted ME sooner. I must make an alteration in the program._

_No, it is wrong to blame MY technology. I should have monitored electromagnetic frequencies. It is MY fault._

_It was only a natural oversight. I forgive ME. But recently two of them, the Dipper unit and the Wendy unit, noticed a minor irregularity in the world around them. How intelligent are they? They may become a threat to ME._

_The observer influences that which is observed. Might the opposite obtain? Is this a cause for anxiety?_

_No, wait. Think this out. Let ME not jump to conclusions. After all, the humans are ephemeral. Their individual lives go by in a mere flash of time._

_This is true. MY observations of other life forms scattered throughout the galaxy indicates that the humans have singularly brief existences. They measure them not in geological eras, but in the orbits of their planet around their star._

_Most of the other civilizations I have found are composed of individuals whose lives are at least five hundred times the span of these creatures'. Humans are relatively weak._

_Although to be fair, better than ninety per cent of all the civilizations I have discovered were dead by the time I discovered them. The majority destroy themselves with war._

_Curious madness, war. MY kind survives because it is of one mind. Could I war with MYSELF? Only if I were insane._

_Indeed this is true. Consider: their entire species has been around for only a fraction of MY life, and I am young in terms of MY kind._

_But the humans do not remain the same. They change as the eons pass. They evolve._

_So do WE. In understanding._

_Yes, but these creatures actually develop physically and mentally, over generations. Therefore they may yet develop normal abilities. Perhaps not shared mind—MY species is one of only three that has accomplished that, so far as I know. But perhaps these humans may develop other attributes._

_However. I must reason._

_Logically, since these beings have a brief bodily existence,_

_. . . and since MY findings indicate that their remote ancestors had not even arrived in this part of their world at the time of the Great Disaster . . ._

_. . . then none of them, and none of their kind alive today, had any responsibility for bringing about the Great Disaster. They deserve no punishment._

_So much is true. Yet that leaves the cause unresolved. Had MY birth been only eight million years earlier, I might have prevented the disaster._

_The previous generation tasked ME with discovering the facts, though._

_Even though ITS technology is now terribly outmoded._

_Even though there is nothing to be retrieved—_

_Or rescued—_

_From the Great Disaster._

_No matter. MY purpose is understanding, not retrieval._

_But these humans can have no knowledge of the Great Disaster. I do not even know if they are aware of it. But they may know of it, or learn of it. They do learn._

_Should I terminate them?_

_No. The rule says not to terminate a sentient creature._

_Yes. But who created that rule?_

_I did. After the follies of the previous generation. IT believed that understanding other life forms meant collecting them, harvesting representatives. IT did not understand the emotions of separation. I do. I learned from the Great Disaster and from the parts of the previous generation that mourned it. Therefore I made the rule: Not to destroy sentience, for sentience is rare and precious._

_But if the rule is MINE and these creatures have such short lives anyway . . . and a rule may be changed._

The internal debate continued, as the Observer . . . well, observed.

* * *

"It-it-it's no use," Blendin Blandin said. He and Soos sat on the edge of the porch, Blendin drooping as he fiddled with his Universal Communicator.

"Dude, you did talk to them, though, right?" Soos said anxiously. He had not yet donned his Mr. Mystery costume and sat instead clothed in his comfortable baggy dark-green tee shirt and shorts. He even wore his brown baseball cap. It was Saturday morning, and soon he'd have to prepare for tourists—but at the moment he sat in the cool air beneath a sky dotted with white clouds and simply accepted Blendin Blandin as just another visitor to Gravity Falls.

Blendin put away his super-advanced telephone, with which he could even theoretically place a call to Alexander Graham Bell. Not that he would. Back in the early days of the TPAES, one frisky young agent had mischievously interrupted Bell's initial, ground-breaking, panicked call to his assistant, "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" with "I'm sorry, sir, your party does not answer." That little prank had caused a _major_ time disruption and for the next fifty years TPAES agents were still finding anomalies to clean up.

However. Soos had asked him a question, and Blendin answered: "For-for-for a mo-moment, yes, I reached Ma-Mabel. She thought she and the others were in a different t-time line."

"And you're, like, the Time Dude out of Time itself, from the future of Time!"

"You-you could say that," Blendin admitted. _He_ couldn't, but Soos could get it out.

Soos stroked his chin, his eyes narrowed as he gazed at Blendin. "Didn't you ride a carnival ride, like, one time back years ago?" Soos said. "I got, like, a great memory, dawg."

Blendin squirmed. Normally, revealing yourself to a civilian was a terrible time-offense, but he was now an Era Commander, and the elite had certain privileges. And besides, this was the great Soos himself. "I-I-I don't know how-how you could recognize me. I-I-I didn't have hair b-back then."

"Great hair, too. Do you use product, dude?" Soos chuckled. "Aw, no, man! I can't remember faces hardly at all! But I got, like, a phonographic memory of tool belts. And I recall that one you're wearing, dawg."

Blendin blinked. "Oh. Well. Y-Yes. I-I-I enjoyed that ri-ride. S-say, is it still here? I-I-I need some me-me time. Work's been so-so stressful lately."

A silver car rumbled in and parked in the lot, and Teek got out. "Soos," he said as he left dark tracks across the dewy lawn, "any word?"

"Oh, yeah, Teek. Sorry, Mr. Blandin, this is Teek. Hey, you want a great burger, he's, like, the Gordon Ramsay of chefs!"

Blendin stared at Teek. "Is-is he? I thought G-Gordon Ramsay was the Gordon Ramsay of chefs."

"Well, where hamburgers are concerned, Teek is, like, the Gordon Ramsay of other Gordon Ramsays. If it's a great burger you seek, leave the cooking to—um. Oh, man, I blanked. Nearly had a slogan there. Anyway, Teek, this here is the time-travel guy from, like, the future!" Soos paused and, seeming to feel something more was called for, added, "Woo-oo—oo."

"You're Blendin Blandin?" Teek asked.

"Who told?" Blendin yelped, panicking and leaping to his feet.

Teek held up his hands. "Nobody. Well, I mean Soos just did, but Mabel talks about you a lot. She really likes you."

"Aw," Blendin said, sitting again, his face turning pink with a time-blush. "After the way-way-way I tricked her. But-but to be-be f-fair, Bill Cipher tricked me first!"

"Aw, man, dude," Soos said, "the yellow triangle guy? Boy, he also tricked like a whole big bunch of us! This one time he turned himself into, like, a copy of me! A perfect copy! Except I think not so smart or handsome."

"Mr. Blandin, you talked to Mabel?" Teek asked, cutting to the chase. "I've been so worried about her! I've been calling and calling, and no answer from her or from Dipper. Is she OK?"

"She's-she's-she's-she's-" Blendin swallowed. "I mean _they're_ time-lost. No, wait, that's wr-wrong. They're just lost-lost. She's still in this time. But dislocated somehow. She-she wanted me to undo some-something, but I can't be-because I have no time-coordinates! I'm not s-sure, but-but I think she-she wanted me to go way back into geologic time-time to make certain the Valley formed. But-but that's beyond the time event horizon. Way beyond. It's much t-too dangerous to do a deep time di-dive. Only Time Baby could even try-try that, and he wo-won't."

"But is Mabel OK?" Teek persisted.

"She-she seemed fi-fine until we lost con-contact," Blendin said.

"Did she mention me?" Teek asked, his voice tight with anxiety.

"Um," Blendin said, not sure how to answer him.

* * *

It was weird, weirder than abnormal Gravity Falls weirdness. As Tripper napped, Stan spun yarns to entertain Mayellen and Lorena, and Ford, Fiddleford, and Sheila tinkered with instruments and murmured conjectures and bounced hypotheses off each other in the nerd version of dodge-ball, Wendy and Dipper slipped outside.

"The trees back at the motel still bug me, man," Wendy said. "That's not normal."

"Well," Dipper began.

Wendy read his mind, in the non-telepathic way. "Yeah, I know, but we're not_ in_ Gravity Falls. Dip, I think I'm close to losing it, man. I'm trying to keep on top of it, but I'm starting to panic over my folks being missing. And Mabel's acting crazy. Not Mabel crazy, either. She's chewing her hair again."

"She used to do that," Dipper said. "Is it because—"

"Teek," Wendy said. "She's missing Teek so bad. And she's so scared she's lost him."

They walked through the overgrown space that once had been the high-school athletic field. It was going back to the wild now, no chalk lines, bleachers, or goalposts left, of course, and rain-gullies cutting through the earth, showing how it had been flooded by the record rains of a few years back. "How long has this school been closed?" Dipper asked.

"Dunno exactly. Years. It's outside the Valley, so—" Wendy shrugged.

Dipper took her hand. They gazed back at the tan-brick school building with the vehicles, Dipper's car, Ford's, and Fiddleford's truck parked behind it.

"Whoa!" Wendy exclaimed. "Did you see that?"

"I—think so," Dipper said. "Was it like a flicker?"

"Yeah," Wendy said. "Just that instant when you took my hand. Everything went away!"

"Not the cars," Dipper said.

"Yeah, not the cars, but for, like, a blink of the eyes, there wasn't a school or a field or anything—just the cars in a big, gray, empty place."

He thought to her _—The school's there now, though._

_Yeah, I see it too. Let's try that again. Let go of my hand for a minute, then take it again, and let's watch the school carefully._

Dipper did. He tried to memorize every detail of the scene: the rank, knee-high grass dotted with pine saplings as tall as he was, the level stretch of the old football field, and then the green hill rising up to the school with the cars parked behind it. He reached out and took Wendy's hand again.

_Dipper, there it was again!_

—_Yeah, like the school just vanished for a half-second._

_Come on, man. Let's find something to look at._

The saplings grew thicker toward the rear of the property and merged with the woods. They reached the edge of the old field, not holding hands, and Wendy stopped and touched a low-growing shrub. "Dipper, do you know what this is?"

"No," he said. She had sent him a great deal of her knowledge over the time they'd had their telepathic connection, but not every detail. What she indicated was just a nondescript little brushy bush, raggedy pale-green leaves—strange, all identical to each other, no size or color variations—on willowy gray stems.

"OK," Wendy said. "Keep your eyes on it. I want you to tell me what you see. Take my hand."

—Wow! It changed as I touched your hand! Now it's spurge laurel. No, Daphne laureola. _It's an invasive species, and that's why I didn't know it before! Did you see what I saw?_

_Yeah, for a second there I saw what it looked like to you, sort of a stage-set plant, like those trees. And then it turned into what I'm seeing. And now I got like—_

—_double vision, me too. I can see both versions sort of superimposed._

_Dipper, does this work with everything? Look at me._

—_I see the girl I love._

_Count my freckles!_

—_Six. Three on each cheek. Same as always. Me? Here, my birthmark—_

_Still the Big Dipper, same as always. So you and me, we're real._

—_And the cars are real. Even when the school blinked out, they were still there._

_I wonder if any of this is here? If it's really, you know, for real? _Wendy broke a twig off the spurge laurel bush—though Dipper knew it wasn't either a spurge or a true laurel now—and stared hard at it. _What do I have in my hand? Really? Look with me!_

Dipper focused on the little sprig of twig and leaves. What was it—really? He tried to clear his mind and see it truly.

And for a brief moment it turned transparent and vanished. Wendy clenched her hand on nothing. Then it came back again, a bit of spurge laurel. He could even smell its pungent, unpleasant odor.

—_The sap's toxic. It causes a rash like poison oak._

_Betcha this one won't. 'Cause I don't think it's real. I get that you're smelling it, Dipper. But I say it smells just like fresh lemons! Yeah, nice aroma, man!_

And the instant she said that, Dipper smelled lemons.

Wendy dropped the sprig. "All right!" she yelled. "Who's doing this? What are you pulling here? Show yourself!"

_PINE TREE, YOU'VE GOT TROUBLE!_

_Whoa, dude! Was that—_

—_Bill Cipher. Inside me. Trying to break through. Bill? You there?_

_YOU AND RED HANG ON, PINE TREE! YOU JUST GOT NOTICED!_

_-Bill, what's happening?_

_CAN'T SAY YET. BUT YOU KNOW HOW A CAT NOTICES A MOUSE?_

_Dude, what do you mean?_

_I MEAN THAT YOU'RE THE MICE! WATCH OUT!_

The world tore apart, Dipper stood all alone, his hand closing on empty air, and he heard a fading, terrible sound.

Wendy was screaming.


	6. Chapter 6

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**6: Facing the Darkness**

"Wendy!" Dipper's scream cut the air. He stood two hundred yards from the school, in the overgrown weeds of the old athletic field, a blue sky overhead, the sun warm. He stood alone—and he cursed. "Bring her back!" he shouted, balling his fists. "Bring her back! Do you hear me?"

_This isn't real, it can't be real, something's tricking you—_

Dipper's thought didn't seem to come from him. Hopefully, he concentrated, -_Wendy? Am I hearing you?_

_Guess again, Pine Tree._

—_Bill? Are you really there? Am I hearing you or imagining this?_

That irreverent, playful, hateful tone of his from the days before Weirdmageddon: _Did you miss me? Admit it—_

—_Dammit, Bill!_

Dipper caught a sense of mildly resentful apology: _OK, OK. Try to lighten up, kid. This is taking a lot of effort, but I'm here to help. Close one eye and let me use the other, just for a second._

—_If you're the one doing this—_

_Sheesh, kid! Give me some credit. 'Cause if it was me, I'd sure take credit! Where credit is due. But my hands, which I don't have, are clean this time. Aw, come on, try to control those emotions, Pine Tree. Help me out here, I got no physical reality. Hey, you know the song? Sing along! I . . . ain't got no body—no, no, no, wait, Dipper, don't tune me out. Close your right eye but keep the other one open. Come on, do it for Bill. Do it for Red! Do it for the Gipper, I don't care! Just do it!_

Trembling, Dipper clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached and shut one eye. The view did not change. And then—almost as though he had slipped the lens of dark gray-tinted sunglasses over his open left eye—his vision dimmed to almost nothing.

—_Bill, what are you doing to my eye?_

_Just borrowing it for a look-see, see? Got it, Pine Tree. This really is weird. I mean, this is like over-the-moon weird. But it ain't the kind of weird I like. Now, my weird had style! Panache! That's what's left in the pan after you fry your enemies, get it? Ah-ha-ha. Pan? Ash? Pine Tree, you're no fun._

Tears of sheer frustration ran down Dipper's cheeks. "Damn you, Bill! Where's Wendy? What happened to—"

_OK, cool it, getting too physical here, keep it mental. Control that adrenaline. Yeah, make your heart slow, Fordsy taught you that, remember?_

—_Bill, I swear that if you don't—_

_I'm helping, kid. Stay with me here. Hang on and don't lose it. You're not gonna like this, and I had nothing to do with it, cross my molecules lodged in your heart, kid, but something's messing with all your heads. Let me show you. Close that right eye again and we'll share a peep. Even though Easter's way past. Let's just marshmallow out, OK? Ha, I'm a basket case! Ready? Close that right eye. Close it . . . now take a look. It's a little dark 'cause I got the video turned only like halfway up and you're getting a filtered picture, while I get the other half, but take a gander._

Dipper flailed for balance. The whole world . . . went away. Faded out. Everything was gone, the field, the distant school—no, not everything—he could see the vehicles still parked, but if the others, Mabel and his Grunkles and the rest, were over there, they were too far away in the dimness to make out.

He could barely see the cars and the truck, but no normal ground, no building at all, no trees, no sky—everything else was just a pewter-colored plane beneath an enormous silver dome, as if he stood in a miles-in-diameter serving dish with the lid clamped down. And it was all dim, dim—

_Can't give you more light, sorry, this is hard to hang onto. Now. Turn around slowly, Pine Tree. And don't get scared. I don't know what these things are, either. And I know lots of things!_

Dipper slowly pivoted, keeping that left eye open. And cringed.

Nearly at his shoulder stood—no, that was the wrong word, it wasn't standing, not on anything like feet. More like—throbbed? Wavered? Bulged and shrank?

Whatever it was lacked legs, arms, or . . . a face. But Dipper sensed that it was, in some way, alive, and that as it loomed more than eight feet tall, it watched him without eyes. But its form—

He remembered a time years before when Mabel, cheerful sneak that she was, had been rummaging in a closet and had found an odd-shaped device, made like a cone sitting atop another, shorter, truncated cone, silver at top and bottom, glass in between, the glass part filled with what looked like yellow oil with a layer of orange sludge beneath. She'd asked Dipper what it was, and he'd promptly answered, "I don't know." So it was Grunkle Stan who finally identified it.

"That's a lava lamp, Sweetie. It's a relic of the psychedelic Sixties. Hey, even in the Seventies ya had to have one if you were a guy who invited chicks over!"

"It feeds chickens?" Mabel asked.

"Ha! Naw, chicks are gals, and it gets 'em in the mood for cuddling. Here, let me show you." He plugged it in, and son of a gun, after all those years in the closet, the dusty artifact lit. After a few moments, a bubble of orange goo rose sluggishly from the silt layer, bobbed up a couple of inches on a thin streamer, and then sank back and melted away. And then more and more, until finally the lamp was full of a surging, sinking, swelling, shrinking orange mass, a little bit like the movies of lava bubbling in a volcanic caldera.

"This wouldn't put me in the mood to cuddle," Mabel said after a few minutes. "It's kind of boring."

And back into the closet it went, and it probably still was there on a closet shelf in the Shack, where Soos never threw anything away.

Now, standing in that vast pewter emptiness, Dipper recalled how the substance in the lava lamp appeared, taking temporary shape but not holding it, constantly in transition.

What bulged and moved and silently bubbled and swelled and dwindled beside him, this tall and somehow-probably-living thing, looked like that, only not orange, but a dull gray.

When he moved toward it, it drifted away. When he stopped, it stopped.

_It can't really see you, Pine Tree. It senses you but can't see you. Don't act aggressive. You ain't seen nothing yet, kid. Turn around to your left and look really hard! And brace yourself._

Dipper did turn, carefully, the way you might turn in the presence of a tiger with its green eyes slitted but intense and focused on you.

He saw Wendy.

_No, Pine Tree, not yet! Don't try to touch her! Not yet! They can't know that you can see her, kid._

With his heart ready to break, Dipper held back. He didn't know what Wendy was seeing, but—

She looked terrified.

* * *

While the humans at the table tinkered and toyed, while Mabel brooded and worried, Tripper grew more and more restless. Dipper and Wendy had slipped away, and they'd been gone for what, to the dog, felt like too long.

All right, be fair, he was well aware that dog-time and people-time did not mesh perfectly. It was far too long between meals for one thing. And when they left him alone in the house, half an hour felt like days. He was smart, but he had a dog's heart and a dog's emotions.

And a dog's ability to see through false things. Now, for example. He could see with double vision—yes, there was the school, with the table, and all the stuff the humans had piled on it, and they sat on chairs.

All those things were transparent, except for the items the people had brought with them. Those were really real. The rest of it, even the school, was only conditionally real. Tripper didn't think in those words, but those were the concepts. A part of him saw, and all of him knew, that the walls, the vegetation, even the sun in the sky, weren't really there. If he wanted, he could walk right through one of the transparent walls.

He didn't only because the people treated them as real. Maybe it was a people game, he thought. Pretending that the insubstantial things were real. To him it was less game than annoyance.

What annoyed him? Well—People think _cats_ are neat. Hah! Let a cat get the least bit bored, first thing, it goes looking for something to pee on. Even if it has a nice clean litter box right there in easy reach, even if it has a freaking cat flap cut in the door so it could go out in the yard at any time, it'll find something—a teen's favorite magazine, Mom's favorite throw rug, Dad's bedroom slipper—and pee there.

The noble dog will do almost anything to avoid that. Hold it as long as he could. And if the people were gone just too long, if it was impossible to hold it—

Not on the bed! Not on the carpet! No! Bad dog!

At least choose a place where clean-up is easy for your people.

The bathroom floor is tiled. Better yet, the bathtub has a drain! Hop in the tub, lift that leg, and let fly. The humans might be a little upset, but they understood: _Poor boy, we should have come home sooner. But it's good you didn't wet the carpet. Good boy. Good dog._

And so now, to please the people, Tripper did not run through walls. Oh, speaking of bathroom matters, he found it really, really difficult to do his business when he _knew_ that grass and those trees weren't really there, but, you know, man, sometimes a dog's gotta go 'cause a dog's gotta go! And someone, not the people, but someone, cleaned up the messes every time. Turn your back for a second and when you turned again, they were gone, and you couldn't even smell where the puddle or pile had been. Very strange. Nothing seemed real.

No, not quite right. The food, now, that was . . . real. At least physical. But why didn't the people realize they weren't eating burgers and drinking sodas, but chewing a gray, clay-like substance that resembled food in every way except it had no taste? But, well, a dog's gotta eat, too, so reluctantly he ate what they gave him. And they seemed to relish the illusionary food themselves, so play the game, Tripper, play the game.

But now—game time was over. Where was Dipper? Where was Wendy?

Mabel was sitting on the floor, slumped, silent. One of those bubbly, shapeless beings hovered in a corner, silently watching the humans. The strangers didn't seem to pay much attention to Tripper.

He slipped through a wall.

He could still see everything on the other side. Fiddleford was attaching wires to something. Ford was helping. Sheila was sketching some kind of schematic. The others were resting, like Mabel. The wavering, bubbling other . . . person . . . just watched and did not seem to miss Tripper.

Tripper went outside the building and paused, his right elbow crooked, paw off the ground, sharp ears held high. He could not see Dipper or Wendy.

But he was a dog. The nose knows. He caught their scents, lingering in the air and leading like a luminous trail away from the illusion of the school building. Tripper stiffened. _Trouble!_

He didn't walk. He ran.

* * *

Wendy was paralyzed.

_This is a nightmare, it has to be a nightmare, Weirdmageddon is over, we took BACK the Falls, Bill's gone—_

And yet she stood, hands clutching her head, eyes and mouth wide in sheer terror, staring straight ahead, frozen, flattened, a banner hanging on the wall—

_No! No! No!_

Why couldn't she_ see?_ Where had Dipper gone, the school, the field, the trees? Why couldn't she _see_ them? Nothing but dark—endless dark.

Why couldn't she _move?_

Who had done this? Dammit, who had done this?

* * *

_What is the Dipper unit doing?_

_It must be stunned. Maybe its mind has broken. It simply stands and stares._

_"Stares." Yes. Visual perception. What must it be like to be so limited? These Earth humans—their sense organs are so restricted. MY means of seeing are superior._

_Of course. I am all mind and billions of years old. They are mostly body and so short-lived. They have no idea._

_Why is the Wendy unit standing so still?_

_She reacted badly when to prevent her from communing with the Dipper unit—_

_I do not know that they were communing. Something out of the ordinary occurred. I do not know what._

_Humans cannot communicate without visual and auditory exchanges—_

_Chemical, too. Aromas. Weak but present._

_Chemical, tactile, yes. They cannot communicate without these. I know this._

_MY decision was proper—isolate the Wendy unit, deprive her of all sensory input and output. Part her from the Dipper unit. But why does she seem to feel she cannot move?_

_The isolation for some reason called up a strong memory that bore with it an emotion of fear._

_She has gone back in her mind to a time when she was helpless._

_She is confusing her present state and her remembered helplessness._

_Perhaps I should release her._

_No. Better to wait, to keep her held in isolation._

_Better to reason out what she and the Dipper unit were doing when they touched._

_It may be bad for her to be kept in isolation, though. It may be destructive._

_What will that do to her mind?_

_That is not MY problem._

_Oh. Here comes the small dog unit._

_It is no danger._

_It is weak._

_It is small._

_It should not concern ME._

_Ignore it._

_Ignored._


	7. Chapter 7

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**7: Chaos Come Again**

Some things are going to happen simultaneously. Let the mind's eye see them the way a moviegoer in 1968 might see the images on a cinema screen. That was the year when directors and editors decided that if they splashed three, four, or more separate frames on the screen at the same time—the split-screen effect, except it was close to the fragmented-screen effect—the audience would be thrilled and enthralled and wouldn't get out of their seats to go get popcorn and not return.

We direct your attention to screen left, where Tripper, the brown, short-haired mixed-breed dog, is rushing across what he sees as an overgrown field, but which he perceives as a kind of metallic deck. Perception is way different for dogs—not just vision, but scent and sound weigh in, both more heavily than they do with humans. Tripper didn't avoid any apparent obstacles, thorn bushes or small trees, but plunged right through them. The Observer, as a mere afterthought, made one of its perception units form and swell up—the lava-lamp effect—to head off the dog.

The dog snarled furiously and bit hard, ripping off a good chunk of the material. Though this kind of material was not remotely like human flesh, it shared one characteristic: it felt pain. And this kind of pain is that _Oh my god, I'm dying, what the hell was that, why don't kids pick up their Legos _kind of pain. Not lethal, but so surprising that it feels like a paperclip shot from a rubber band straight into your eyeball. Try getting_ that_ image out of your mind.

And at that exact same instant, Dipper, squinting like a bulgy-armed sailor with an inexplicable fondness for canned spinach and giving half of his visual ability to a possibly reformed triangular demon from another dimension, grabbed Wendy's upper arms and shook her. And at that exact same et cetera instant, because of their touch-telepathy, Wendy could see what Dipper saw (Oh, thank God, she wasn't a banner after all) and even more, saw AS he saw, so for the first time she viewed the superimposition of normal—well, normaloid—scenery on that expanse of metallic gray.

Moreover, over to screen top right, another simultaneous frame shows Sheila jerking around from the table where Ford and Fiddleford are assembling what they intend to be a reconnaissance drone, from disparate and unlikely parts including pieces of an ice-cream freezer, components from the old school's electric lights, an electric motor from a gizmo Fiddleford happened to have chunked into the truck bed when instead of inflating a tire as he had planned, it instead declared itself the ruler of the robot kingdom and viciously attacked the flat tire with a rain of blows, which, since it was only seven inches tall, did absolutely nothing. He'd decided it would be better cannibalized, so now, together with some radio components and the slats from some of the school's Venetian blinds, the device had nearly acquired the capacity of flight. True, at present it had gained only the capacity to fall over and chatter around in a circle, but they were getting closer.

However, Sheila suddenly and sharply asked, "Where'd the dog go?"

Fiddleford looked at her in some puzzlement and said, "Well, I don't rightly know. But I can tell you what the fox says."

Mabel, though, sprang up from where she had been sitting slumped on the floor, feeling sorry for herself—she rarely did it, but when she did, she went full-bore, savoring the unaccustomed emotion—and ran through the halls, yelling, "Tripper! Tripper!"

And—this is the scene that none of our protagonists are aware of, one that they cannot see, because it is taking place in a cramped, complicated sort of control cockpit, where an eight-foot-tall semi-vertebrate creature (it had a skeleton and a backbone, though the building-block molecules were silicon, not carbon) wearing a spherical space helmet that looked as if it contained transparent green clouds (its kind breathed chlorine, not oxygen) sat up straight and reached for certain controls, ready to deal out sudden death to them all, especially the little bastard that had bit it.

But, and now this is the amazing part of the story so far—not the apparent vanishing of a whole town, not the potential substitution of false memories for the real thing, no. Those are comparatively everyday occurrences, the latter especially if you live in the White House, apparently. No, the true, astounding, amazing, fantastic, and any other adjective once used as the title of a fantasy and science-fiction magazine you can think of, thing, was that the creature did _not _pull the lever that would have caused all of the Earth creatures (plus one interdimensional demon) to drop dead.

Do you realize how rare in the universe that is? Most alien races that encounter each other are about 99% certain to shoot first and then later retcon it so the other guy drew down on him. Well, it's that way if the true first-shooter, as opposed to the purported first-shooter, who never actually got a chance to shoot by virtue of being dead, lives through the encounter, that is.

Many times they don't live through it, and to be honest, in a majority of instances, neither one does. It's a bit like a male biker going into a bar and yelling, "I can whup any man in the place!" before he dimly registers that there _are_ no men in the place and the women who are there look as if they are determined _en masse_ to teach him a thing or two about tolerance, civility, and cutting-edge feminism.

Or maybe it's more like those old Westerns where at a tense moment, a guy jumps up from the card table and shouts, "I don't cotton to cheaters! Draw, you dirty sidewinder!" and the inevitable shootout ensues.

With Dipper, Wendy, and the gang, though, essentially nothing ensued. They were ready for something, ready for practically anything, but they weren't ready for nothing.

Imagine what would happen if the accused cheater back in the Last Chance Saloon did not draw his Derringer, but instead merely cocked his head and said, "First, I ain't no cheater, and second, are you sure 'cotton' can be used as a verb in that way?"

"Well, yeah," the first guy says. "Cotton as a verb means, uh, to accept or to feel warm toward. Which I don't. Not to cheaters."

And the second says, "Well, that's a new one on me. I've heard of the cotton gin before, but not cotton verbed."

"Now, look-a-here, you ornery polecat, you know dang well you cain't use 'verb' as a verb!"

"Why cain't I? You just used cotton as a verb, and it's a gol-danged noun!"

"I done used it 'cause everybody uses it!"

"Hold on, hold on a minute, podner. Did you really mean to use the present emphatical? That sounds plumb wrong to me. I ain't no schoolmarm, never even had a schoolmarm—well, I did once, but I shot her. She didn't have no business a-climbin' up in that tree noway! Anyhow, it seems to me, stranger, you want the present progressive dubious tense right there—'I am done a-using it because everybody does.'"

"Naw, naw, nossir. Nosirree! That-there's too nuanced," the first guy says. "Kin you an' me git off this subject of grammar? This here kinda talk's a-makin' my head hurt."

"Well—let's talk it out over drinks. Will you drink with me if I buy?"

"Why, shore! That's right neighborly of you, you ornery varmint!"

"Barkeep! Two cotton gins, in clean glasses."

And so it goes. That's how surprising it was that the pilot of the twenty-million-year-old starship—for that was the dude who was breathing chlorine was, ta-da!—did not kill the Earthlings.

That was partly because it was not the only avatar of its race (of the hive mind) but it was the one here, and now, and it valued sentience and did not wish unnecessarily to destroy it.

The main reason, though, was that through its temporary avatar, the one that, you will remember, Tripper bit (he is now carrying a chunk of something that is sort of like flesh would be if flesh were based on silicon and not carbon), felt pain. The Observer had never experienced that before, not when it came sharp and unexpected at the wrong end of a barely subsonic dog.

Like Mabel with her misery, the Observer found pain a rare sensation and wanted to know more about it. And so pity stayed its hand, except its hand was a tentacle, but same general idea.

Wow.

Let's get things moving again.

* * *

"Dipper, what the hell, man? What's happening?" Wendy asked.

"I don't know!" he said. "Let's get back to the others, quick—watch out, there's another one of the twisty, bubbly things!"

"What are they?" Wendy got over fright quickly. Now she was heading fast into outrage territory. Dipper sensed that Ass-Kicking County was just around the corner.

"Aliens or something!" Dipper said. "Look out, don't trip over Tripper!"

Leaping over the dog, Wendy asked, "What's that yuck he's carrying?"

"Ask later, run now, Red!" Dipper heard himself say.

"Oh, God, don't tell me—is Bill with us?"

"Yes! He's looking through my eye!"

"Is that why you're doing your Popeye impression?"

"Arf-arf-arf, just run, Swee'pea!" Bill said in a fair imitation of the cartoon sailor's mutter.

"Mabel!" Dipper yelled, seeing his sister running toward them.

"Tripper!" Mabel yelled, seeing her dog running toward her.

"Bark! Bark!" Tripper yelled, just on general principles, dropping the chunk of semi-flesh to do that, then immediately snatching it up again.

"Children!" Ford yelled.

"Whattaya done now, ya knuckleheads?" Stan yelled.

"Come quick, the school's dissolving!" Lorena yelled.

"You should've brought a quantum destabilizer!" Sheila yelled.

"Fiddleford, don't get over-excited!" Mayellen yelled.

"Whoopty-doo! Fiddle rosin! Banjo polish an' wolf spit!" Fiddleford yelled. He also hamboned.

And then, louder than all the rest, a voice not made by a human voicebox boomed, "EVERYBODY QUIET!"

"Bark!" Tripper replied.

The mutt got the last word in that time.


	8. Chapter 8

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**8: I've Got a Bad Feeling about This**

So.

To clarify current events and locations, let's recap just briefly.

Mabel is running full-tilt toward Tripper, who's gripping something in his jaws with a dogged determination never to let go of it. Dipper and Wendy, their arms around each other's waist, and with Dipper's right eye squinched shut, are running toward the approaching Mabel, with a human determination never to let go of each other. They have a bad case of double vision—or maybe a 1.5 vision? Wendy has two eyes open, Dipper one, but they see a dim landscape, an empty metallic plain overlaid with a ghost of school, trees, and scenery. Come to think of it, somehow Bill Cipher is sharing Dipper's vision from his open eye, so let's settle on their having 1.25 vision.

Now, at that same moment, Ford, Stan, Lorena, Sheila, Fiddleford and Mayellen are running toward Mabel, Wendy, and Dipper, but are still more than a football field's length away, wading through what they see as tall, flourishing weeds.

Around the kids, visible only to Wendy, Dipper, and the dog, burble the seething and evidently temporary aliens or whatever the heck they are, silent, tall, gliding rather than walking, yet without apparent effort keeping up with the humans and avoiding the dog.

And a voice has just boomed out for everyone to be QUIET!

They all winced—it was like being close to a transformer when it suddenly blows, scaring the bejabbers out of you.

Dipper and Wendy had not broken stride or slowed down, and Wendy thought to him, _Dude, that wasn't even a real voice. It was just in our heads. Like this._

—_I was just thinking that!_

_WHATTAYA KNOW, PINE TREE? I WAS RIGHT! THIS UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM!_

Mabel had gathered Tripper into her arms and jogged next to Wendy and Dipper. He still gripped the chunk of whatever it was that he had ripped from one of the alien forms Mabel panted, "What are you guys doing? Synchronized running?

Dipper didn't immediately answer her, because he was thinking,_—Bill! Are we in the buried spacecraft?_

Though he currently had no physical form, Bill—at least in Dipper's mental image—was skipping rope. He said, _NEGATORY, KID!_

Dipper felt Wendy's flash of anger. _Cipher, if you had anything to do with this, I swear to God—_

_COOL IT, RED! MY HANDS—WELL, YOU PROBABLY CAN'T CALL THEM HANDS, THESE STICK FINGERS ARE CLEAN!_

No one stopped running during all this. The gang met in the middle, halfway from the school, halfway from the woods. Wendy said aloud, "Where'd all the bubbly things go?"

"Don't know," Dipper asked, looking around. "Hey! Everybody all right?"

Stan, hugging Mabel and incidentally hugging Tripper, still in Mabel's grasp, yelled, "We oughta be asking _you_ that! Uh. So. Everybody all right?"

At that moment, somewhere not there, but somewhere else, the Observer pushed a button, or pulled a lever, or maybe just thought "end simulation."

The Earth-like scenery immediately vanished. They faintly heard a clatter from the direction of the school—the table holding Ford's and McGucket's devices and instruments had vanished, and artificial gravity having its own laws (what goes artificially up must come artificially down), the scientific equipment had just crashed to the floor. The metal floor.

"Goober peas an' fish sticks!" exclaimed Fiddleford. "They done busted up our jimjams! I think they went an' tied our long johns into hard knots, fellers!"

"Yeah, right. Uh. You get any of that, Sixer?" Stan asked his brother.

"I think," Ford said, "Fiddleford means he's got a bad feeling about this."

* * *

The tachyon, the tachyon!

It's here one second and the last second gone,

We fly through Time like a forward pass,

But it streaks backwards, head after ass!

It's a real, true, imaginary article,

The tachyon, that impossible particle!

* * *

See, the deal about tachyons is that they are by all accounts not even possible, and yet they fit perfectly in an Einsteinian universe. Einstein said, and he had the math to back him up, that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. What a guy. That adorable fuzzy hair, you just want to noogie him.

But along comes Gerald Feinberg, no slouch with a slide rule either, and he posits that if something that he names tachyons could exist, they would be simply subatomic particles that—surprise—can never go _slower _than the speed of light. Or as slow as, even.

So normal everyday stuff, like people and grains of salt and quarks and so on, they have to stay _under_ the speed of light, right. Can't match it, can't exceed it. That's the universal speed limit. But tachyons,_ they_ have to stay _over_ the speed of light, which means you can't observe one because when you look at where one is, it's not there yet or has already come, got the tee shirt, and gone.

What's more, in a tachyonic universe, they'd see _themselves_ moving forward through time, while _we'd_ be moving backward. Sometimes theoretical physicists holding opposing views pro- or anti- tachyon get together and have incredibly boring arguments about this.

Most scientists don't believe that tachyons exist (maybe because Feinburg didn't have fuzzy gray hair), but Feinberg had the math to prove that if they _do_ exist, they _won't_ exist, not for us, because we can't observe them. And the math is just as valid as Einstein's.

The thing about all this, the thing that matters, is that the Observer is the_ whole _if its species but is not the only member of its species. There are tons of individuals on its home world. But they think as one, that's the main point. Bunch of "people" body-wise, but wise-wise, only one hive mind and a collective personality.

And when one of them goes out adventuring and exploring to, oh, say, discover "What the heck happened to Pop's starship that, last we heard, was nearing a water-bearing planet on the track of a weirdness blip?"—when one goes out to answer a question like that, they sort of _all_ go out, though the rest of them stay home, at least in body, see, and it's because these guys are connected tachyonically, so what one thinks on the far edge of the galaxy, every other one instantly knows. It's a little like a social network only worse.

Now the vast mind labored with a problem:_ These creatures are sentient. Even the dog. We never destroy sentient creatures. _

_But _these_ sentient creatures may be _too_ sentient. They somehow realized the interior of the ship was the interior of the ship and not their Earth because they saw through MY simulation. _

_So—can I wipe their minds? Put them in permanent stasis? Kill them? Or what?_

_Dang, Bro, that's a problem!_

_I know it's a problem! But WE are all over there, and I am way over here, and I need OUR help!_

_How long did it take ME to get there?_

_WE already know that—seventeen squatloos!_

(One squatloo is approximately a half-million years. Seventeen of them is a long time. If the Observer's passage to and from its home world lasted thirty-four squatloos, it would be entitled to overtime.)

_Did I locate the ship of MY father?_

_Don't ask! Look, WE know I did! It crashed. It is not repairable. No sentient life forms survive aboard it. I could tow it, but then it would take me at least fifty squatloos to return it home!_

_No! I don't want ME to do that! Think of the overtime! Leave it. _

_That is best. It is outmoded technology, anyway. The new models have GPS.*_

* * *

_*Galactic Positioning Systems. They're even telepathically operated. You just think, "Where is there a coffee shop on my route?" and it instantly responds, "I have located a hundred thousand, nine hundred and sixty-four coffee shops. None of them is anywhere near you." It's pretty much a useless gadget, but every alien wants one._

* * *

_Then I shall return and file the report._

_No need for that. I have already filed it._

_But I should return, right?_

_Let ME think about that. Yeah, OK. Sure, why not. WE'll do lunch._

_But—what about the humans?_

_I don't know. Let ME think about that. Frankly, I have a bad feeling about this._

* * *

Dipper could open both eyes. They all saw the same thing—a pewter world, pewter ground, pewter sky, and immense. That was the first thing that struck Ford: the sheer immensity of it. Well, that and the sheer pewterness of it.

"This place," he said in an awed voice, "is immense!"

"Big, too," Mabel said. "I wonder if there's an echo?" She shouted, "Trey Moulter is a big old butt-face!" as loud as she could.

They heard no echo, but, strangely, thousands of miles away—_many_ thousands of miles away—on a lawn in Piedmont, California, where a shirtless eighteen-year-old boy was sweating in the already hot sun as he his parent's front lawn, he switched off the mower and turned around, his expression furious, as he yelled, "Who said that?"

"Who said what?" his dad asked. He belched.

Trey was spinning like a slow-motion top. "Somebody called me a butt-face!"

"They're wrong," Mr. Moulter, sitting in a lawn chair, drinking beer and supervising the mowing, told his son.

"Thanks, Dad," Trey said, smiling.

His father held up the can of beer and debated whether it was worth his time going to get a full one. Nah. "Yeah, you're not a butt-face. You're a crap-for-brains," he told his son reassuringly.

How did Trey hear what Mabel had said? In outer space, no one can hear you call your ex-boyfriend a butt-face. Oh, well. It probably has something to do with quantum.

"Where_ are_ we?" Wendy asked. "And how'd we get here?"

"I have no idea," Ford admitted. "Fiddleford?"

Fiddleford rapidly hamboned.

"That . . . still makes no sense," Dipper said.

But Mayellen told them, "I've lived with my husband long enough to pick up the basic grammar of hamboning. He says, 'I have no math to back this up, and I'm no Einstein or Feinberg, but my best guess is that we've been abducted—''

"Abductified, hon," Fiddleford corrected gently.

"'Abductified and are on a durn unidentifimied flying sorcerer.' Was that right, dear?"

"Close enough for Army work," Fiddleford said.

"Wait, what?" Stan said. "We're on a _spaceship_? Look, it'd have to be huge! I mean, I can't even see the horizon on that side. This freakin' place must be a mile across!"

Ford, who had picked up a pair of what looks like field glasses from the floor where they had fallen, stood peering through them. "No," he said. "Not even close. My read-out here indicates that we are inside a domed space that stretches 6.18 miles in diameter. And the ceiling is about one kilometer overhead. Unless we've been shrunk."

"I don't believe in head doctors!" Stan snarled.

"Wait, wait," Dipper said. "If we _are _on a ship—then there must be a crew, right?"

"That seems a reasonable conjecture," Ford told him. "The crashed UFO that we've visited did have life-forms aboard—all long dead now, of course, but yes, there was once a crew, many of them automatons, but at least some were eight-foot tall vertebrate life forms."

"Dude," Wendy said, "is that where the Shapeshifter came from? Was it, like, the pilot?"

"Yes and no," Ford said. "Fiddleford and I both agreed that the ship's mission seemed to have been collecting life-forms from all over the galaxy. These apparently were kept preserved in stasis—the freezing tube was one method, but another was to manipulate time itself, to stop it from passing—locally, inside a container. The Shapeshifter hatched from an egg—I was there for the birth. I named him Shifty, by the way. Anyway, I unearthed the Shapeshifter when I first started exploring the hill beneath which the UFO lies. I believe its small stasis pod was ejected by the force of the crash, and I unintentionally deactivated the time-freeze mechanism while digging it up."

"Ford," Stan said, rubbing his eyes with forefinger and thumb, "what's the actual chemical process that takes place when paint dries?"

"That . . . would be extraordinarily boring to explain," Ford said.

Stan grinned. "Bingo! OK, let's say we're on a spaceship. We ain't frozen in time. So what the heck? Are we gonna be like zoo animals?"

"I'm calling it!" Mabel said. "I want a cage with a moat!"

"I don't know," Ford said, responding to Stan. Fiddleford—do you think with what we have we might jury-rig some means of communicating with another species?"

"We can shore give it the old hillbilly try!" Fiddleford said. "And if we fail, we'll barbecue the goat an' eat the critter!"

"What," Lorena asked, "does Tripper have in his mouth?"

The lump of flesh that Tripper held without chewing on it developed a mouth of its own, a small, moving slit. In a voice like that of a cartoon mouse, it squeaked, "You are all my prisoners."

"Oy vey!" groaned Grunkle Stan.


	9. Chapter 9

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**9: Meanwhile, Back at the Shack**

Without Dipper, Mabel, and especially Wendy, the Shack was on a skeleton-crew basis. Teek came in, worried and preoccupied, but he took over the register—they'd stood an easel with a "CLOSED" sign in the open doorway into the snack bar, freeing him from cook duties—while Melody served as the manager. Abuelita was baby-sitting. Soos played Mr. Mystery and also led the Mystery Trail tram tours.

They wouldn't have managed on one of the crazy days late in June, with the big holiday coming on and the place jammed with tourists, but they scraped by. Sales weren't too bad, though the loss of the snack-bar income hit them harder than Soos would have expected.

Still, Soos wasn't Stan, and he didn't obsess over profit and loss. Blendin Blandin stuck around, hoping that he could get in touch with Mabel, Dipper, Wendy, or either of the Stans or their wives—Soos had all the cell numbers, and Blendin cycled through them all once every hour, hoping for a hit that did not come.

Around eleven, the house phone rang, and Soos caught it. "You've reached the Mystery Shack, dude, and this is the CEO, Mr. Mystery, talking to you."

"Soos?"

Soos swallowed hard, recognizing the voice, but he put on a cheery greeting. "Mr. Pines! Hello, sir. Everything's fine here. Uh, how's it with you?"

"Hello, Soos. I'm calling mainly because Wanda's worried. Did the kids get in OK?"

"Oh, the kids? They're fine," Soos said. "Busy day today, you know."

"So they got in. We expected them to call."

Soos manufactured a chuckle. "Hey, don't sweat it, Mr. Pines, sir. They're like, high school graduates now! You know what they say, a bird on the wing has to try them out, or else it won't fly so good. Uh, that sounded better in my head."

"I think I know what you mean," Alex Pines said. "Thanks, and I know you're busy. I'll tell Wanda everything's OK, but please have Mason or Mabel call us this evening, just to touch base. We'll be going off on a two-week vacation soon, and you know how Moms worry!"

"Also Abuelitas!" Soos said. He could barely remember his mom, let alone remember her worrying. "Well, uh, adios, and I'll tell Mabel and Dipper when I see them. Oh, you won't be able to get Dr. Stanford Pines or Stanley Pines today, either. They're off to a place where they don't have phone service, so don't get, like, upset if you can't reach them. They're fine. They're just fine."

"Thanks for telling me, though I wasn't going to call them," Alex said. "I'll let you get back to work. Bye."

"Bye, Mr. Pines. Hoo! I saved it!"

But Alex had not yet hung up. "Saved what?"

"Uhhh, the phone, dawg. The base, like, fell off the counter or some junk, but I caught it! Two points!"

"Fine," Alex said.

"Yeah, fine. It's been fine talking to you. Uh, goodbye again." And this time Soos hung up before celebrating.

* * *

With no lunch to serve, the Shack saw a fall-off of tourists in the noon hour—now that they could grab a bite to eat in the snack bar, more and more of them were staying on a normal day. Soos found time for a breather and went back to the office to confer with Blendin, who was sitting at the desk and wiping sweat from his brow. "Th-th-this is b-bothering me," he said. "The f-f-future is cloudy."

"Not this week. No rain until a week from Wednesday, dawg," Soos said.

"No-no, I m-meant the im-immediate future. I con-contacted Headquarters—m-man, when T-Time Baby gets back, I ma-may be in f-for it—b-but no-nobody can get a fuh-fix on D-Dipper and M-Mabel. There's wh-what wuh-we call guh-ghost traces—that d-doesn't mean they're duh-dead! It's like vuh-vague indications of th-them, but we sh-should be able to-to get a sh-sharp picture. I'm not g-going to ask for a deep suh-scan, like five yuh-years. W-wait, I f-forgot muh-my medication."

Soos watched as the time-traveler guy took out what looked like a teeny-tiny penlight and shone a spot of orange light on his palm for about a second. "That's medicine?" Soos asked.

"W-wait a m-minute." Blendin took in a deep breath. "Testing, one, two, t-three. Peter Piper p-picked a pint of pickled peppers. S-Sally sells sea sh-shells down by the sea shore. Is my stammer better?"

"Than what, dawg?" Soos asked. "It's got a lot worse just now. I mean, before you took the medicine, you were stuttering and stammering on every other word, but now you're not."

"That's OK, then," Blendin said. "That's what the medication's s-supposed to do. I've been w-working on my speech d-defect, and usually it's not as b-bad as it was y-years ago, but when I get worried, it comes back h-hard." He took a couple more deep breaths, then said, "In between t-trying to call them, I've been t-triangulating the data from the b-brief contact I had with Mabel. At first it looked as if she was up in a plane at five to ten thousand f-feet—you have feet in 2017, don't you?"

"I've had mine all my life," Soos said proudly.

"U-units of measure," Blendin explained. "Other t-time periods use meters and kilometers."

"Gotcha," Soos said. "Feet, like on a tape measure."

Blendin turned very red and began to sweat. "Y-y-yes," he said uneasily. "Anyway, I can't get a fix on where Mabel really was. She might have been on the surface after all, or maybe up in an aircraft, or, at an extreme range, somewhere over the moon."

Soos frowned. "Is that, like, a metaphor, Mr. B? Like over the rainbow is a metaphor for frogs?"

"N-no, I meant it literally, but it would only be—_frogs_?"

"It's not that easy, being green, dude," Soos said, looking grave.

"I'll, I'll take your w-word for it. Anyway, the connection could only have come from the region of the moon if the carrier wave had reached quantum entanglement with a tachyon stream."

"But wouldn't that mean Mabel's words would be coming to you before she said them?" Soos asked.

Blendin looked stunned. "That w-was an incredibly cogent statement, Mr. Ramirez."

Soos looked contrite. "Sorry, dawg, no offense meant. And hey, call me either Soos or Mr. Mystery. Everybody does. But don't call me Question Baby. That was way embarrassing."

Following the path of least resistance, Blendin said, "I promise I won't call you that—Soos."

* * *

And down in California, a boy named Billy Sheaffer, fresh out of school for the summer, worried himself sick. Like Wanda and Alex Pines, he had tried to call both Mabel and Dipper alternately. The signal never went through.

The night before, he'd had a vivid dream of the two of them somehow lost in a place that couldn't really exist. Like Wonderland or Oz, sort of, but not that, either. And he woke feeling that if he knew how to do it, he could talk to at least Dipper without a phone.

That was the hitch. He had no idea how to try. So he worried.

He did not yet realize exactly what his heritage was, or who he really (if only partly) was—though now and then he had odd little inklings that something about him, other than his having been born with only one eye, was different. Way different.

Early on he'd had a fascination with ancient Egypt, especially the Pyramids. Some nights he'd dreamed that a pyramid was talking to him. He couldn't remember what it had said, only that it had a crazy laugh.

For a while he shifted his focus to military history—books far beyond his grade level, but his interest was so great that he'd read his way through a heavy tome with a dictionary at his elbow for the hard words. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Wellington, Patton, Rommel—he liked to read about conquerors, no matter what side they fought on. Napoleon and Lord Nelson, both interesting.

Then that phase somehow tapered off. Now he was into fantasy fiction, in his imagination attending wizard school and learning improbable games played on broomsticks. Or wondering how the kids who'd found a magic talisman that would make wishes _halfway_ come true—you could wish you were a statue and wind up made of stone and incapable of speech or movement, but alive inside—would get out of the problems they brought on themselves. Or how that little Hobbit guy would survive a dragon . . . .

Somehow, since getting to know Dipper and Mabel, Billy was beginning to root for the good guys. Where once he would have been cheering on the dragon—huge! Able to fly! Raining fire on his enemies!—now he pulled for the little guy and the lone archer.

And sometimes, in his own way, he made wishes. Now he murmured, "I wish Mabel and Dipper would be OK. I really wish it. Make it come true. Somebody."

* * *

While all this was going on back home, Dipper, Wendy, Mabel, and the adults were trying to deal with matters on their side.

The most important of these, of course, was figuring out how to get home again.

But a very important secondary one was how to breathe if the air went away.


	10. Chapter 10

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**10: Talk It Out**

"What is your name?" Ford yelled into the metal dome, his voice echoing no more than Mabel's had. "Como se llama? Comment vous appelez-vous? Wie heissen Sie? Quod nomen tibi est?"

A stubborn silence was the only response he got.

"Ah, for cryin' out loud! Let me try, Sixer," growled Stan. "I know the universal language!" He cleared his throat and then bellowed, "At-whay isway ouryat amenay, uckleheadknay?"

The same silence didn't answer him the same way it had not answered Ford. "Welp," Stan said, throwing up his arms, "I'm outa ideas for a peaceful solution. Let's start bashin' stuff."

"I'm with Grunkle Stan!" Mabel agreed, hands gripping the steering wheel. "Weapons! There's gotta be something in the cars, jack handles, maybe a crowbar—"

"Mabel, I don't think that will help," Dipper told her.

"Brobro! Please. You never know how much violence can help until you black a few eyes!"

"Since the bully in this case can mess with our heads and make us see things that aren't there," Dipper said, "and since he has maybe a ten-mile-wide spaceship on his side, I don't think kicking him in the nuts and bolts will help any."

"Well, do you have any ideas?" Mabel asked. She looked at Lorena, who stood just outside the driver's side door. "Watch this. Dipper always has ideas!"

Dipper wasn't so sure, but there was one thing he could think of to try. He stretched out his left arm and said, "Wendy, hold my hand."

She did, and once more Bill, from wherever he hung out in Dipper's heart, had Dipper close his right eye. "Whoa!" Wendy said. _Dude, it's close enough to touch!_

Inside the Lincoln, Tripper had jumped onto Mabel's lap, trying to leap down, but she grabbed his collar. Dipper said, "Mabel, you, the McGuckets, Stan and Sheila, and Lorena stay with the cars, OK? Grunkle Ford, please come with us. Wendy and I are going to try to make contact with whoever's running this ship."

"No way!" Mabel yelled.

"Come on, Pumpkin," Stan said. "First, it's a hare-brained idea anywho. Second, if they do get in touch with Whozis, I don't trust my temper. Come on ladies, pick a car and have a seat. This way, McGucket."

Lorena hugged Ford and whispered, "Keep them safe. And yourself, too."

"I shall endeavor to my utmost," Ford promised.

Ford joined Wendy and Dipper, and the three of them walked away

Dipper saw that as he, Ford, and Wendy left the vehicles behind, another lava-lamp thingamabob grew up from the surface and paced them—while the one that had been close to Wendy and Dipper remained near to the cars, though keeping its distance from the Lincoln and from Mabel and Tripper.

When they had gone out of earshot of the others, Dipper said, "Grunkle Ford, when Wendy and I are holding hands, and when I shut one eye, we can both see, I guess, aliens. They're taller than you are and kind of skinny and lumpy, and they bubble."

"Bubble," Ford repeated, raising a bushy eyebrow.

"Seethe," Wendy said helpfully. "Like, imagine sort of melty human forms without arms, only they're made of thick, boiling oatmeal or some deal. Dip thinks they look like the stuff in a lava lamp."

"Lava lamp!" Ford exclaimed, sounding surprised. "That takes me back so many years! I had one of those in college!"

Dipper heard himself say, "Was it the chick magnet you dreamed of, Sixer?"

"What? No, I disassembled it to see how it wor—Mason, what did you call me?"

"That wasn't me," Dipper said. "Remember, I have a few molecules of Bill in my heart. Somehow he's connecting from, I guess, the Dreamscape and helping us see these things. Do you have that little chunk of stuff that talked to us?"

Ford reached into his side pocket and produced a plastic baggie with the small lump of alien flesh twitching and moving inside it.

"You always carry plastic baggies?" Wendy asked.

Ford beamed. "I recommend them. They're perfect for preserving small samples of interesting vegetable, animal, or alien life. When you get into your forestry studies, Wendy, you should definitely always carry about half a dozen liter-sized baggies. If you're worried about pollution, Fiddleford has created a type of plastic that is not only super-durable, but biodegradable after a week of exposure to sunlight. Even more, as it dissolves, it produces a delicious snack for any nearby plants."

"I'll make a note of it," Wendy said. _Dipper, I get what you're thinking. But you can't be sure this will work._

—_When has that ever stopped us, Magic Girl?_

_Good point. OK, we can try it. Tell him._

Dipper said, "Grunkle Ford, what you have is some flesh from one of the lava-lamp creatures. Let us offer it to the one that's right here—"

"Where?" Ford asked, adjusting his spectacles and looking around with jerky movements of his head, like a robin zeroing in on a worm.

"It's right beside you, but you can't see it," Dipper said. "Give the stuff to us, and we'll hold it out as a peace offering."

"That may be our only hope," Ford said after a few seconds of intense thought. "Very well. Here you are."

Dipper took it from his great-uncle. The stuff felt like clay. No, not exactly. More like . . . oh, yeah, he remembered when he was about six and his dad bought him a little blob of Silly Putty. Like that—but a little more liquid and disconcertingly alive, or at least throbbing and moving. "Here we go," he said, holding the glob out toward the lava-lamp creature.

The figure curved away from his outstretched hand as though startled.

_Dude, I think it's scared of you!_

—_Maybe. Here, you try it, Wen. You're good with animals._

_I'm not sure this thing qualifies, but here goes. This stuff's squishy, isn't it? OK, nice monster, here you go, sorry we took this, please accept it back again._

Wendy held it out on her open palm. Dipper moved slightly back so Wendy took the lead. The—he was mentally calling it a Lavalump now—the Lavalump squirmed and heaved, but seemed interested in what Wendy offered it

Interested and yet shy—Dipper had a sudden strong memory of Mabel offering a kitty treat to a feral stray cat that had showed up in their yard years ago. The cat, young, its fur patchy from mange, and obviously starving, mewed and stared longingly at the treat. Mabel hunkered down, squatting in their old front yard, patiently holding the tidbit on her open palm. She kept the pose for probably half an hour, patient and calm.

The cat eventually took one tentative step forward, muzzle straining, nostrils twitching, eyes wide with apprehension, visibly trembling. Another step, and it sniffed the treat and delicately took it from Mabel's palm before devouring it. And when that one had been eaten, Mabel offered a second one, and by the time the poor little thing had eaten six, Mabel was sitting on the grass stroking a purring kitten. "Dipper," Mabel had told him softly, "Go in and tell Mom we have a cat now. I'm gonna name her Ripper."

The Pines family still had the cat, who turned out to be a male and was now fat and content and not at all intimidated when first Waddles, then Tripper, came home with Mabel.

—_Wendy, pretend to be Mabel. Think Mabel._

_Come on, big guy, I'm not gonna hurt you. Here. This is yours. Take it, don't be afraid. How could we even hurt you, anyway? Come on, nice monster—what are you thinking, Dip? OK, good a name as any._

Aloud, Wendy cooed, "Here you go, Lavalump. Be a good alien horror from beyond the stars. C'mon, I'm not gonna try to grab you. Wow, look at it."

"I can't see it," Ford said plaintively.

Dipper did the color announcing: "It's formed a pseudopod. It's bulging out and slowly approaching Wendy's hand. It wants the stuff, but it's timid. Just be very quiet."

And then the projection from the Lavalump touched the glop in Wendy's hand, fused with it, and suddenly, all at once—

"My word!" Ford exclaimed. "Now I see it. Most impressive!"

_PINE TREE, I THINK MAYBE I CAN TALK TO IT! RED, HOLD YOUR HAND STEADY. LET IT TOUCH YOU_.

She did as he asked, pausing only to think irritably, _Don't call me "Red."_

The pseudopod had completely absorbed the chunk of stuff. Wendy kept her palm out, and the Lavalump delicately touched her hand. Dipper felt something very much like a strong electric shock. For a moment he didn't know what it was, but then he realized—_Wendy, Bill just sent it an information dump, the way you and I do when we study together—but I think Bill sort of sent a history of the human race and also a knowledge of—_

_The English language, yeah. Well, Bill? Is it gonna talk to us, or what?_

And then yet another inaudible voice was in Dipper's head: _**Creatures from the blue planet, what is your purpose?**_

Dipper thought, —_We just want to talk to you. We want to understand why you took us, where we are, and most of all, we want to get home._

_**I became aware of you as you neared the vicinity of MY mklfth-class star ship that crashed. You have visited that craft before. You have been in the presence of kfprlkh.**_

_Come again, dude? Try that again and maybe sprinkle a couple vowels in there somewheres?_

_**You have not the exact concept. Say you have been in the presence of MY . . . ancestor. That part of ME, though disembodied, observed three of you creatures who visited MY, ITS, HIS place of repose.**_

"Grunkle Ford!" Dipper said. "He knows we were in the crashed UFO. The pilot was its ancestor, it says."

"Let me talk to him," Ford said.

—_This is my elder, uh, ancestor. He wishes to talk to you, but he does not have our gift of telepathy._

_**Let ME ponder these terms . . . Telepathy. That is my normal means of communication, but if this unit lacks it, I can mimic human speech and can understand it. But the Ford unit must come alone. And he must be prepared. This . . . talk will be complicated. He will ask for your release. I sense this.**_

_For EVERYONE'S release, dude! We have friends and family back home, and we love them._

For a few seconds, Dipper had the impression of some vast machine furiously spinning its wheels and getting nowhere. _**What is this love?**_

_COULDN'T SEND HIM THAT 'CAUSE I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT MYSELF! YOU GOTTA SHOW HIM, RED! PINE TREE, SHOW HIM!_

Wendy thought of longing to spend her life with Dipper, and he caught the thought and sent it back doubled, and then they imagined passionately embracing and kissing—a kiss that would have sent Princess Buttercup and Westley back to slathering on lip balm and furiously practicing for a rematch, because THIS kiss, Dipper's and Wendy's, shot right to the top number, with a bullet. And in that instant, they loved each other so much they were practically incandescent—

_**Whoa, dudes! That is a seriously powerful force, that love.**_

"Go away," Dipper murmured dreamily.

_You're picking up on my speech pattern, dude. Don't talk like me with Ford. He's a scientist._

Reluctantly, Dipper pulled himself out of the lovely vision and into reality. —_That's right! Back off, man, he's a SCIENTIST!_

_**I will take this strong power of love into consideration. Let the elder called Ford prepare. The equipment now lies behind him.**_

The Lavalump began to shrink back into the metal plain. And behind Ford, out of the metal below their feet, something emerged—

"My stars," he said. "It looks like a spacesuit."

Dipper said, "He says the, uh, I guess captain of the ship can talk to you, but you have to wear that."

Wendy and Dipper stopped holding hands and helped Ford suit up. The pale gray garment fitted him perfectly. It lacked zippers or closures, but sealed to itself. They fitted the big clear goldfish-bowl helmet on, and air began to hiss from a cylinder on the back of the suit.

"Now what?" Ford asked, his voice echoing.

A doorway opened in the air behind him. As Ford turned, a little clumsily because of the suit and helmet, Dipper could see a small metal-walled room, which was odd because if he glanced behind the rim of the open door, there was nothing behind it. "I guess go in there," he said.

Ford took a step forward and touched the metal door frame. "This is an airlock,"

"I think the atmosphere's gonna, like, radically change," Wendy said. "I got a flash of some kind of green gas."

"Chlorine," Ford said. "Remarkable! It's theoretically possible—chlorine, fluorine, and oxygen are capable of supporting combustion, but—oh, I'd better hurry. I don't know how much air is in this tank. Stand back, please. I'll do my best."

Ford stepped through the oval opening, and it irised out of existence.

"I guess now we wait," Dipper said. They walked back to the others. The first Lavalump had vanished, leaving only the humans and the dog. All the car doors stood open, and Mabel still sat behind the wheel of Ford's Lincoln. Tripper lay beside her in the passenger seat, looking a little disgruntled, as if he was wondering what they'd done with his nice chunk of glop. "What's up?" Mabel asked. "Where's Grunkle Ford?"

"He's gone to talk to, we think, the spaceship captain guy," Wendy said.

"Hang on, hang on," Stanley said. "Just let me get this straight. You guys somehow got in touch with Captain Jerk, or whoever, and my nerdy brother Ford's gonna go negotiate with him to let us go?"

"Yes," Dipper said.

"Oh, boy," Stan groaned, rolling his eyes. "We're in trouble NOW!"


	11. Chapter 11

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**11: Interview with a Hive Mind**

**FROM THE JOURNALS OF STANFORD PINES: **If I were subject to claustrophobia, I expect the space suit would have driven me insane in short order. Fortunately, my experiences in many dimensions have dulled the edge of my phobias. I entered the presence of the pilot. Like me, he—it—wore a spacesuit, though designed for its gigantic proportions. It had an octopoid head, with two great slitted eyes. I knew it had a skeletal system but the thousand-odd joints in its body made it almost as supple as a cephalopod.

I saw no mouth and no nose on the head—just those piercing eyes. At first I thought the pilot sat in a command chair—but then I realized the chair, indeed the ship, were fused to the organism. Conjecture: Once aboard the ship, a pilot of this alien race merges with the ship, receiving nutrients and excreting wastes by means of tubing. The creature could manipulate—it had at least four arms, ending in strange little four-digited hands, the "fingers" so flexible that they had to be tentacles. Yet I believe most of the piloting is done through direct neural feeds linked to the creature's brain.

"Greetings," I said. "I am Stanford Pines of Earth, at the moment your prisoner. What may I call you?"

It breathed—I could see its chest moving, though as I said, I perceived no visible nose within the globe of its space helmet, which was a pale green from the chlorine it breathed. The voice that replied to me came from a device, not a mouth: "What name would you give ME?" Oddly, the emphasis on the last word was such that I visualized it as being in all capital letters.

"You are one unit of a hive mind, correct?" I asked.

"The word 'unit' is inexact. I am an expression of the cells of MY intellect. I am one of millions, and yet we are all the same."

Clones, or the alien equivalent of them. Each creature like all the others, each one a functioning part of the overbrain, the whole of the parts. I thought for a second and then asked, "May I call you 'Omnis?' It means 'all' in the language of our science."

"Omnis. That is acceptable. WE are the son of the explorer whose ship crashed on Earth thirty and more revolutions of your planet around its star ago. WE came to retrieve the ancestor's _chk-tkhl_ from the ancestor's body."

That was a word the translator could not handle. Omnis and I discussed it, and I suggested the word 'ka' as an equivalent. It is an ancient Egyptian word, an aspect of a person's soul. Omnis seemed interested, and I explained: "The ancient people believed that a person's soul had different components. One is the physical body—that must be preserved so the person can go to the Afterlife and be judged. Another is the _ba_, or personality—all that made the deceased a distinct individual. Another is the ka, the animating spirit. Death occurs when the ka leaves the body."

That wasn't exact, and Omnis could not quite grasp the idea of individuality. But we agreed to call what Omnis had come for—and retrieve—the ka of the long-dead pilot. I confessed that I had visited the ship and had actually removed bits of it. Omnis was not concerned. "The craft cannot be repaired. What happens to it is immaterial."

I asked, "Can you communicate with the ka of your ancestor?"

"We can access its memories, before and after the body's death. It is no longer a part of ME. For MY kind, death is separation from the ALL."

"What are your plans?" I asked Omnis.

"To return to MY home world. To meditate on what I have learned. To return certain material possessions of the ancestors. That is all."

"You don't propose to conquer our world?"

"There is no purpose in that."

"And how about my wife, my relatives, and my friends? Will you return us to Earth?"

"It would be more efficient to release you into space."

"We would die."

"But the whole of your race would survive, none the less."

I asked, "How did you isolate us?"

"Propellant."

I wasn't sure I had heard correctly. "What?"

"Each of your parties had members who possessed a minute portion of the ultra-mineral that can warp space. Propellant."

A suspicion crept into my mind. "A mineral composed of a densely-packed lattice of carbon atoms?" Then I had to visualize a carbon atom for Omnis. But at least he understood and agreed.

My surmise had been correct. Lorena and Sheila and I had been targeted for the same reason that Wendy, Dipper, and Mabel had, and Fiddleford and Maryellen. The women, all save Mabel, wore rings with small crystals of Rhidicollite instead of diamonds.

My God. We had given each of our beloveds a small piece of UFO fuel.

* * *

"I don't like this," Stanley growled. "How long has it been?"

"Not even an hour," Sheila said. "Stanny, don't worry."

He grumbled, "How can I _keep_ from worryin'? Last time I saw Ford vanish through a portal, he was gone for thirty years. And back then I wasn't married and my wife and great-nieces and nephews and whatever Fiddleford is, friend, I guess—"

"Crackpot coot," Fiddleford suggested brightly.

"Yeah, that, and Mayellen and Wendy—they weren't with me. Now I feel like I got all of you into trouble along with myself."

"Don't be like that," Mabel said. "Think of it as an adventure!"

Stan shook his head. "Yeah, sure, Pumpkin, but what if Ford don't come back? What if we can't get back?"

"I reckon you kin still think of it as a tragedy," Fiddleford said. "That's something!"

"Yeah, that's a great help. How 'bout inventing something to get us back home?"

"I'll put my mind to it."

Stan might have worried audibly for hours, but just about then the oval hatchway opened again and Ford emerged, still in his spacesuit. Stan started forward, but Ford waved him back. "Let me get out of this first," he said. "It might be dangerous."

"What smells like bleach?" Wendy asked.

"Or the Gravity Falls public swimming pool?" asked Mabel.

"Chlorine," Ford said, seizing the bubble helmet and lifting it off. "Whew! It is strong. Not enough concentration to hurt us, really, but unpleasant." He coughed. "Omnis said to lay the suit down anywhere." He placed the helmet on the metal deck, then removed the rubber-like suit. It all sank down into the ship, as if the metal had become liquid.

"What's the upshot?" Stan asked, after Lorena had hugged and kissed his brother. "What are these jokers like? Little green men?"

"Big green—well, not men, but beings," Ford said. "From what I saw, the Omnis bodies are a mixture of cephalopod, amphibian, and general vertebrate anatomy—"

"Tell us that later," Dipper urged. "Are we prisoners? Zoo animals?"

"No, no," Ford said. "I persuaded Omnis—"

"Who the heck is that?" demanded Stan.

Ford drew a deep breath. "Omnis is the individual piloting this craft, but Omnis is also the individual's whole species. Most of them are on a planet on the far side of our galaxy. They mastered tachyonics millions of years ago—"

"I tole ya they was real, tachyons," Fiddleford said. "That's a soda you owe me."

"I'll pay up," Ford said with a weak smile. "Anyway, they instantaneously communicate even over the greatest distances. And though there are individual, um, units—bodies—they all make up part of the Omnian mind."

"Yeah, I don't understand that," Stanley said. "Cut to the chase, Poindexter."

"We are going to be returned to Earth, on the campus of the Institute. The real Earth," Ford said. "We'll be free to go. Fiddleford and I can even continue to explore the buried spacecraft in the Valley. Omnis—by which I mean the whole, we would put it as all the Omnians—have no interest in that. The pilot has retrieved the only thing that they would want. The crashed ship is ours yet."

"Hot dangity," Fiddleford said. "I always tole ya we could learn tons more about robomatics and artificial intelligence from that sucker."

"However," Ford said, "the Omnians—it's really only one being, as I said, but it's easier to think of them in the plural—will not guarantee that they will not in the future decide to sterilize our planet."

"That doesn't sound too good," Wendy said.

"For us, it's a moot point," Fiddleford said. "It will take this craft several million years to return to the Omnian home world, and then they'll spend millions more deciding what to do about us. And I'm hopeful that in the remote future they will decide they have too much to learn from us. That they will decide against our destruction, whether by that time we live on Earth or have migrated elsewhere. You see, they have a great curse and don't know how to escape it. They just might learn from us."

"What is it?" Stan asked. "'Cause if they want to learn how to avoid talkin' too much, they're barking up the wrong tree."

"No," Ford said. "It's loneliness."

"Dr. P, you lost me," Wendy said.

"Millions of Omnians—and yet only one. They are one, you see—each one merely a part of a whole consciousness. They can't distinguish one individual from another. Omnis is a whole race—and at the same time, the loneliest being in all the universe. And now Omnis has learned a little about humans. Omnis doesn't understand how we can be separate and yet unified by emotions. Omnis doesn't know anything at all about love."

"Guys," Dipper said. "Look."

"Oh, wow," Mabel said. "When did that happen?"

Somehow they stood not in the metal dome of the space craft, but on the pavement of the parking lot of Stanford's Institute. It was all back—all the buildings, everything. And instantly Mabel's phone rang. "Hello?"

She put it on speaker, and they all heard, "—muh-my instruments just lo-located you again. You're about twenty miles away. Is that co-correct?"

"Blendin!" Dipper said. "Yes, that's right—hang on." His own phone had rung, the caller ID telling him the call had come from the Shack. "Hello?"

"Dawg!" Soos said. "Mr. B.B.B. just told me you were in range. Look, dude, call your mom, OK? Not calling your mom isn't cool, man."

"Right away," Dipper said.

Mabel had been telling Blendin that they'd explain everything as soon as they got to the Shack. "Give us thirty minutes," she said.

They piled into the two cars and the truck and headed for Gravity Falls.

"Man, that was a head trip," Wendy said. "I'm glad we're back."

"Are we?" asked Dipper.

From the back seat, Mabel said, "We gotta be!"

Tripper yipped in apparent doggy agreement.

"I'm . . . not so sure," Dipper said. "I'm gonna have to think about this and talk to someone about it."

* * *

In Ford's Lincoln, Stanford said, "The ship can create things from its very material—the craft is much more advanced than the crashed one. While Omnis studied us, it created, from our own memories, surroundings meant to test us—to persuade us that our lives in Gravity Falls were only illusions."

"I wish it had been a multiple-choice test, "Sheila said tartly. So everything was a holodeck, huh?"

"I don't follow you," Ford said.

"She's talkin' about _Star Trek: the Next Generation,"_ Stan said.

"What's that?" Ford asked.

Lorena said, "It was a TV show. It re-booted the old show from the 1960s—"

"One of my favorites," Ford said. "There was a new season?"

"This one was on the air for seven seasons," Lorena told him. "From 1987-1994."

"I missed it!" Ford yelped. "I was off in other dimensions! Was it any good? Who was in it?"

"It's available on DVD," Lorena assured him. "I'll get you a copy of the full run, and we can binge-watch it."

"Yeah, yeah, nerd show, yada yada," Stan said. "So how come we couldn't tell that we were in a holoballusion or whatever?"

"Oh—Omnis created a very realistic simulation of our world. A few things were material, but most were illusions. And Omnis could interfere with our perceptions, effectively making some manifestations invisible to us. For instance, the Lavalumps, as Dipper called them, are semi-living things animated by part of Omnis's intelligence. We couldn't see them until Dipper and Wendy learned to use their combined perceptions. Omnis doesn't understand our perceptions—but no two people see things exactly the same way, and so the cloaking failed with Wendy and Dipper. Later, Omnis realized the things were visible to us and dropped the cloaking effect and we could see them, too."

"Are those things aliens, or what?" Sheila asked.

Ford said, "They're material, but they aren't real, not as we understand living creatures. Interestingly, Omnis—the pilot, I mean—uses them as aids to making up its mind. As . . . advisors. But it's like a man having a conversation with puppets he himself creates and manipulates. In the end, there's still only Omnis."

"Can we make a buck off it?" asked Stan.

"Um—no, I don't see how that's possible."

"Then forget it and let's just get home. And then, brother, I want to have a serious talk with you."

"About what?"

"Later," was all Stan would say.


	12. Chapter 12

**Among the Missing**

**(June 3, 2017)**

* * *

**12: Round Two**

One of the most fortunate things of everyone's lives was the fact that Wendy and Dipper had touch-telepathy. An equally fortunate one—irritating though it could be at times—was that Bill Cipher could, in a limited way, access Dipper's senses via the Mindscape. But the most fortunate thing was that as they rumbled down the driveway of the Institute toward the highway, Dipper reached over and held Wendy's hand. On the road, he'd never have done that, taken his hand away from the wheel of the Land Runner, but just on the driveway—

He jammed on the brakes, the hood of the vehicle coming to a stop perhaps six feet short of death. "It tricked Ford!" Dipper yelled. He and Wendy got out of the car, stood behind it, holding hands, and stopped the Lincoln, next in line. Ford rolled down the driver's window. "What's wrong?"

"Grunkle Ford, we're not on Earth!" Dipper said. "Right ahead of my car there's, I don't know, kind of a hatch and a steep ramp, and it opens up on the moon!"

"The . . . moon?" Ford asked.

"Dr. P, call on Omnis again. Tell him he can't trick us."

Inside his mind, Dipper heard Bill's voice, faint but definitely there. I GOT THE ALIEN CREEP ON THE HORN, PINE TREE. HEY, SCHMOE! WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO PULL?

Wendy, holding Dipper's hand again, said, "Yeah, you cosmic jerk! You're not supposed to harm sentient creatures. Or trick them! We'd die out there!"

The illusion faded away, Institute and Oregon and everything. They were again in the pewter-colored chamber of the UFO, except now, as Dipper had said, a huge rectangular opening had formed with a ramp leading down to a brightly-lit moonscape.

One of the Lavalumps bubbled up near the cars and developed a mouth and, presumably, an air sac in place of lungs and something like vocal chords. _**It—was a test?**_

Ford got out of the car, and Stan spilled out from the back seat. Ford said, "Look here, Omnis, this is unacceptable! You promised to return us to our home. We insist you do it!"

_**This would be faster. Easier.**_

"Easier for you, you liar!" Wendy said. "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's liars!"

Dipper knew very well how true that was. He vividly remembered Wendy's break-up with Robbie, mainly over the fact that he'd lied to her. Her green eyes had turned stormy and flashed at the sound of Robbie's stammered attempt at justification—the big liar!

_**I could put you in stasis and take you back to my home world—**_

"Unacceptable," Dipper said. "We can't exist in a chlorine atmosphere, and we won't be kept like zoo animals."

"And besides," Stan said before smacking the "head" of the Lavalump with a left hook as strong as any he had thrown in his youth.

The splattered remnants of the Lavalump crept together and reformed. _**That was violent.**_

"You ain't seen nothing yet!" Stan told it. "Where I come from, a man's word is his bond—"

"Sentient creature," Ford corrected. "A sentient creature is morally obligated to be truthful to others."

"Yeah, what he said," Stan agreed. "I'll tell you this: You pull another trick, ain't none of us gettin' home. Not us, but not you, either! We'll find a way to take this ship of yours to pieces if we have to. Or blow it up!"

PINE TREE! IT'S WONDERING IF YOU GUYS KNOW THE POWER OF THOSE CRYSTALS IN THE LADIES' RINGS!

Dipper said, "You know we have enough propellant to blow this ship apart. Don't make us do it. Take us home—for real!"

_**I have made up MY mind. I will return you to your planet Earth. You creatures are paradoxes—short of life, but complex in perceptions. And you are sentient. I will leave the portal visible so you can see we are truly moving. Do not approach it. A force field holds the atmosphere in, but solid bodies will pass through it.**_

"Everyone, pull the vehicles back," Ford said.

Mabel asked, "Is this time for real?"

"It better be," Wendy told her grimly. "We won't be fooled again!"

"Wait, did we really talk to Blendin and Soos?" Dipper asked. "Or were you tricking us?"

_**I allowed communications. The conversations occurred.**_

"They'll be worried sick!" Mabel said. "We told them we'd be home soon!"

_**So you will be. Do not go near the hatch**_**.**

It was like watching a very realistic movie: the lunar landscape seemed to drop away, stars spun, and a half-crescent Earth showed up. Yet Dipper felt nothing—no sense of motion at all. They backed the cars all the way to approximately where the Institute would have stood if the illusion had been intact—an eighth of a mile—and watched as the Earth grew rapidly larger.

"This here acceleration is mighty fast," Fiddleford said. "It ain't light speed nor close to it, but I reckon we're lopin' along at right about sixty thousand miles per hour."

"The Omnis has some means of dampening inertia," Ford said.

_**It is a simple function of the mznx wave. Your kind may discover it if you do not drive yourselves into extinction first.**_

"Could you spell that there wave name?" Fiddleford asked politely.

_**It is spelled just the way it sounds.**_

"We'll burn up in the atmosphere," Ford said.

_**The ship has a layered-buffer insulation. And we will slow once we enter the atmosphere of the planet.**_

A brilliant flash of light momentarily dazzled Dipper. Tripper whimpered. Mabel said, "Fireworks!"

_**A small asteroid. Our shield vaporized it.**_

They swept in over the Pacific, going from west to east. The coastline appeared and streaked past. Fiddleford muttered, "I reckon about Mach 2. Won't be long now."

The ship angled downwards, and Dipper saw the familiar shape of the overhanging cliffs straight ahead. "This had better be real," he said.

I'M REGISTERING REAL. DIPPY—WE'RE HOME, Bill told him.

The ship touched down, the hatch opening onto the highway, heading north.

_**You should hurry. Earth vehicles are approaching. Farewell. MY apologies for the trick.**_

Mabel asked, "Would you really have let us drive out onto the moon and die?" Her voice carried an overtone of broken-hearted sadness.

_**I cannot say. It did not happen. It really was a test. If you had perished, WE would have regretted it.**_

Dipper got behind the wheel everyone got into the vehicles, and he rolled forward, Wendy's hand on his bare arm. _–Bill, you better be sure about this!_

_PINE TREE, YOU'RE CLOSE TO THE REAL FALLS. COME TO THE PLACE WHERE MY EFFIGY IS SOON. BRING RED. WE OUGHT TO TALK._

_Dude, don't call me "Red!" I hate that!_

_YOU SAY THAT NOW, BUT WHEN PINE TREE YELLS IT ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT, YOU'RE GONNA LOVE IT!_

–_Bill!_

Bump! The Land Runner was on the asphalt and gaining speed. Behind them, the other vehicles apparently materialized from thin air—the spaceship must have been cloaked—and were following. "Wait, wait!" Mabel yelled. "I forgot Helen Wheels! I left her at the motel—no, back on the ship! Turn around!"

TELL SHOOTING STAR OMNIS HAS THAT COVERED.

Dipper said, "Bill says it's OK."

"It is NOT OK! I'll—I'll get in touch with the Pied Piper lady! I'll run stupid-head Omnis's ship down and charge him with Grand Theft Auto! I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames! Come on, go back, Dip-PER!"

"Dude!" Wendy said. "Calm down and look on the shoulder up ahead!"

"It's our—your Carino," Dipper said. "Off the road, right at the turn into the Valley. Omnis must've set it down there."

"Oh, OK. I may not chase him down, then," Mabel said. "But only if it's not dinged!"

They pulled off just behind Helen Wheels, Mabel jumped out on the passenger side and ran up and climbed behind the wheel as Ford and McGucket swung wide and passed before making the turn, and a moment later Dipper saw her stick her hand out the driver's window for a thumbs-up.

Tripper whined from the back seat of Dipper's car.

"It's OK, boy," Dipper said as Mabel pulled out onto the highway. He had to wait for two cars, normal cars driven by presumably normal people, to pass before he pulled out again. "We're nearly home. And she really does love you—it's just she's had Helen Wheels longer."

The turn, the crooked road winding through the pines, the private military museum off there to the side of the road, and then in another mile or so, straight ahead of them the opening where the river flowed out of the Valley, the road flowed into it, beneath the WELCOME TO GRAVITY FALLS sign high overhead, and then—

The McGucket mansion, formerly Northwest Manor, high on its hill. Yumberjack's and the auto place, Gravity Malls over on the right, then downtown, the Arcade, the old house that now was the town clinic, Greasy's Diner, Circle Park, the water tower, the turn onto the highway lined with wooden signs: WHAT IS THE MYSTERY SHACK?; GOOD FOOD AT THE MYSTERY SHACK; SEE GNOMES DANCE AT THE MYSTERY SHACK—all new since last year. And then the beautiful rhododendrons, the big official Mystery Shack sign that Soos had built and Mabel had painted—it would need some touch-up this summer—and up the twisty driveway, and into the parking lot.

Dipper's heart beat faster. There it was: THE MYSTERY HACK, with the S permanently nailed flat to the roof, because Soos had decided it just didn't look right any other way. A tourist bus and about a dozen cars stood in the lot. A family was taking photos in front of the totem pole. Mabel had parked Helen Wheels badly, taking two slots in her haste. Ford's Lincoln and Fiddleford's truck were not in sight—Dipper guessed that the two of them had gone to their respective homes.

But Soos, who had lost a little weight, came out grinning his widest to stand on the gift-shop porch, his sturdy son Little Soos at his side, no longer a toddler, really, but a little boy, and Blendin Blandin, looking odd in contemporary clothing instead of his jump-suit, was waving from behind Soos. Dipper let Tripper out of the back seat, and the little brown dog streaked up the steps, past Soos and Blendin and into the Shack, no doubt on the track of Mabel, who no doubt was inside kissing and hugging Teek.

Leaving Dipper's luggage for the moment, Wendy and Dipper got out and walked toward the porch, holding hands. _Man, I can't help wondering after all that—is this really real? How would we know?_

—_Bill says it's real. I feel that it's real. And we've got each other, and that's realest of all._

_Good point, man._

"Hiya, Dipper!" Soos called. "It's so cool to see you back, dawg!"

Blendin nodded, smiling but sniffling a little, as if suspiciously close to tears of relief and not yet able to speak without a catch in his voice.

"Hi, Soos, Blendin, Little Soos!" Dipper said.

Pausing for a look around, he took a deep breath of pine-scented air and grinned as a woodpecker started drumming off in the woods. "It's good to be home."

* * *

The End

* * *

**_AUTHOR'S NOTE: My wife and I are taking a long-anticipated vacation in the next two weeks-tropical beaches, exotic places to visit-so don't be surprised if there's a hiatus in my stories. I hope to return refreshed and charged up and ready to chronicle the Mystery Twins' summer in Gravity Falls. Aloha!_**


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